V-Dem is an international team effort and one of the largest social science data collection projects on democracy in the world. The Global Team includes our Principal Investigators, Steering Committee, Country Experts, Project Managers, Staff and Scholars and the V-Dem Institute, Regional Managers, Country Coordinators, and many more.
The Principal Investigator Board is the highest decision-making body. The Principal investigators began their work in 2008.
The Steering Committee was created in 2015 for the purposes of overall guidance and decision-making connected to the various V-Dem programs and projects.
The Project Managers were instrumental in the development of survey questions and the preparation of the collection of data in specific substantive areas. The diverse specialization of the team and the division of labor enabled us to define concepts, identify existing data sources, and create survey questions that reflect the wide-ranging work and accumulated knowledge on these topics. It also created a decentralized system of informal consultation among experts (academics and practitioners) in these areas. In addition, Project Managers are responsible for assuring cross-country equivalence for their indicators, so that a given question is not interpreted differently in varying country contexts.
Regional Managers are responsible for identifying possible Country Experts and investigating problems of validity at the regional level. The first Regional Managers were recruited in the fall of 2011. Some of the Regional Managers have launched Regional Centers and you can read more about their work here.