vdemlite provides a lightweight version of the Varieties of Democracy
(V-Dem) dataset that incorporates many of the core measures of V-Dem for
the contemporary period and is easy to work with in R. The package
provides functions for downloading and loading the data, as well as for
exploring the data and searching for particular indicators.
vdemlite addresses two challenges that arise with the using full
dataset. First, it can be readily used in cloud and production
environments like Posit Cloud and shinyapps.io without having to
purchase additional computing resources. Second, it provides
user-friendly functions and arguments that makes it easier to download,
filter, and explore the data in R. The goal is to make the dataset more
accessible to new users who may not have completely developed a
wrangling workflow and more convenient for more advanced users who
frequently use V-Dem for contemporary analysis.
The indicators included in vdemlite are taken from the Structure of
V-Dem Indices, Components and
Indicators
document that is in turn drawn from Appendix A of the V-Dem codebook. It
includes all of these indices and indicators plus some background
factors a few additional commonly-used indicators. The dataset covers
1970 to the present and includes all countries in the V-Dem dataset.
You can install the development version of vdemlite from GitHub with:
# install.packages("pak")
pak::pkg_install("eteitelbaum/vdemlite")vdemlite has three functions: fetchdem(), summarizedem(), and
searchdem().
fetchdem() is the main function that downloads the V-Dem data and
loads it into R. Within fetchdem(), you can specify one or more V-Dem
indexes or indicators along with the years and countries you are
interested in. The function will download the data and return a tibble
with the specified indexes and indicators.
Let’s grab the polyarchy score for the BRICS countries between 2000 and 2020.
library(vdemlite)
# Grab the polyarchy scores for the United States between 2000 and 2020
brics_dem <- fetchdem(indicators = "v2x_polyarchy",
start_year = 2000, end_year = 2020,
countries = c("BRA", "RUS", "IND", "CHN", "ZAF"))Now we can visualize the scores using ggplot2 (or do whatever we want
to do with them!).
library(ggplot2)
ggplot(brics_dem, aes(x = year, y = v2x_polyarchy, color = country_name)) +
geom_line() +
labs(title = "Democracy in the BRICS Nations",
x = "Year",
y = "Polyarchy Score") +
scale_color_viridis_d(name = "Country", option = "turbo", end = .8) +
theme_minimal()
You can also retrieve data for multiple indicators by using the combine
function c() just like we did when we specified multiple countries.
fetchdem also includes functionality for retrieving groups of
indicators as they relate to the structure and aggregation of the V-Dem
dataset. See the documentation for details.
If you want a quick summary of an indicator or set of indicators,
summarizedem() will provide a searchable HTML table with summary
statistics as well as info on the missing data (grouped by country) for
the specified indicators. summarizedem() can be used with the same
arguments as fetchdem(), e.g. indicators, start_year, end_year,
and countries.
Finally, you can use searchdem() to find specific indicators or all of
the indicators used to construct an index. For example, we can use
searchdem("v2x_civlib") to find all of the indicators used to
construct the V- Dem civil liberties index. searchdem() without any
arguments produces a searchable HTML table of all indicators in the
dataset.