Data

Engaged society

(best estimate)

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What you should know about this indicator

Question: When important policy changes are being considered, how wide and how independent are public deliberations?

Clarification: This question refers to deliberation as manifested in discussion, debate, and other public forums such as popular media.

Responses: 0: Public deliberation is never, or almost never allowed. 1: Some limited public deliberations are allowed but the public below the elite levels is almost always either unaware of major policy debates or unable to take part in them. 2: Public deliberation is not repressed but nevertheless infrequent and non-elite actors are typically controlled and/or constrained by the elites. 3: Public deliberation is actively encouraged and some autonomous non-elite groups participate, but it is confined to a small slice of specialized groups that tends to be the same across issue-areas. 4: Public deliberation is actively encouraged and a relatively broad segment of non-elite groups often participate and vary with different issue-areas. 5: Large numbers of non-elite groups as well as ordinary people tend to discuss major policies among themselves, in the media, in associations or neighborhoods, or in the streets. Grass-roots deliberation is common and unconstrained.

Scale: Ordinal, converted to interval by the measurement model.

Indicator name: v2dlengage

Engaged society (best estimate)

Best estimate of the extent to which ordinary people independently discuss important policy changes among themselves, in the media, in associations or neighborhoods, or in the streets.

Source

V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

Last updated

March 7, 2024

Next expected update

March 2025

Date range

1789–2023

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes data and research on democracy and human rights.

It acknowledges that democracy can be characterized differently and measures electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian characterizations of democracy.

The project relies on evaluations by around 3,500 country experts and supplementary work by its researchers to assess political institutions and the protection of rights.

The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

This snapshot contains all 500 V-Dem indicators and 245 indices + 57 other indicators from other data sources.

Retrieved on

March 18, 2024

Retrieved from

http://v-dem.net/vdemds.html

Citation

This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.

Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Cecilia Borella, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Rydén, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2024. "V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v14" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/mcwt-fr58;
Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2024. “The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data”. V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 9th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We expand the years covered by V-Dem further: To expand the time coverage of today's countries and include more of the period when they were still non-sovereign territories, we identified the historical entity they were a part of and used that regime's data whenever available

For example, V-Dem only provides regime data since Bangladesh's independence in 1971. There is, however, regime data for Pakistan and the colony of India, both of which the current territory of Bangladesh was a part. We, therefore, use the regime data of Pakistan for Bangladesh from 1947 to 1970, and the regime data of India from 1789 to 1946. We did so for all countries with a past or current population of more than one million.

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All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Engaged society”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from V-Dem. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/engaged-society-score [online resource]

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “Engaged society – (best estimate)” [dataset]. V-Dem, “V-Dem Country-Year (Full + Others) v14” [original data]. Retrieved July 4, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/engaged-society-score