The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is an attempt to measure and conceptualize democracy throughout the world. With a global team of over 50 social scientists, they put forth five high-level indicators of democracy (scale 0-1, low-high):

• Electoral: Are rulers responsive to citizens? Is there electoral competition?
• Liberal: Are individual & minority rights protected? Are limits placed on the government?
• Participatory: To what extent do citizens participate in political processes?
• Deliberative: Are political descisions motivated by the public good?
• Egalitatrian: Do inequities hurt the ability of citizens from participating in government?

With these high-level indicators, they can group countries into four regime types:

• Closed Autocracy (0) No multiparty elections for legislative or executive branches of government.
• Electoral Autocracy (1) De-jure elections are held, but they fail to be free and fair.
• Electoral Democracy (2) De-facto free and fair elections are held, but state suffers from a low liberal indicator score.
• Liberal Democracy (3) De-facto free and fair elections and satisfactory levels of high-level indicators are met.

Created by Kray Freestone, Ryan Cooper, and Kristina Randrup