V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg

The V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) is an academic project at the University of Gothenburg that rates every country in the world on hundreds of measures of democracy. It is the original source of the widely-quoted 2021 designation of India as an 'electoral autocracy.' Its Democracy Report series is the highest-scoring institutional report in the CID corpus — Adequate at the very top of the band (7.87–7.94), behind only Pew's one-off 2021 survey, the corpus's lone Research-Grade study. It is the mirror image of the advocacy and government reports scored elsewhere: where those lacked a codebook, a sampling frame, inter-coder reliability, and a way to verify claims inside the document, V-Dem has all four. It publishes a 200-plus-indicator codebook, codes 202 countries on a fixed framework, runs about five expert coders per measure through a Bayesian model that reports a margin of error on every number, and releases its full 31-million-point dataset for anyone to re-check. The grade describes the apparatus behind the 'electoral autocracy' call, not whether the call is correct — but unlike almost every source that repeats the label, V-Dem hands a skeptic the tools to test it.