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Justified political positions

(best estimate)
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Democracy

What you should know about this indicator

Question: When important policy changes are being considered, i.e. before a decision has been made, to what extent do political elites give public and reasoned justifications for their positions?

Clarification: Because discourse varies greatly from person to person, base your answer on the style that is most typical of prominent national political leaders.

Responses:

0: No justification. Elites almost always only dictate that something should or should not be done, but no reasoning about justification is given. For example, "We must cut spending." 1: Inferior justification. Elites tend to give reasons why someone should or should not be for doing or not doing something, but the reasons tend to be illogical or false, although they may appeal to many voters. For example, "We must cut spending. The state is inefficient." [The inference is incomplete because addressing inefficiencies would not necessarily reduce spending and it might undermine essential services.] 2: Qualified justification. Elites tend to offer a single simple reason justifying why the proposed policies contribute to or detract from an outcome. For example, "We must cut spending because taxpayers cannot afford to pay for current programs." 3: Sophisticated justification. Elites tend to offer more than one or more complex, nuanced and complete justification. For example, "We must cut spending because taxpayers cannot afford to pay for current government programs. Raising taxes would hurt economic growth, and deficit spending would lead to inflation."

Indicator name: v2dlreason

Justified political positions
(best estimate)
Best estimate of the extent to which political elites provide complex, nuanced, and complete justifications for their views when considering important policy changes.
Source
V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 7, 2024
Next expected update
March 2025
Date range
1900–2023

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

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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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Citations

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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: Justified political positions”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from V-Dem. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/justified-political-positions-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. “Justified political positions – (best estimate)” [dataset]. V-Dem, “V-Dem Country-Year (Full + Others) v14” [original data]. Retrieved November 17, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/justified-political-positions-score