Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED)

DEED v6, which includes 5979 events related to democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation across 136 countries. The next version of DEED (v7) will be published in early 2025. We generally publish a new DEED version every year. You can sign up to our listserve to receive updates about DEED.

DEED v6 includes 5979 events related to democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation across 136 countries from 2000 to 2023. Countries are included in the sample, if during the period of 2000 to the present, the country experienced a sufficient drop in V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index.

We are working to expand the dataset to improve coverage across countries and years that are currently underrepresented.

To get a better sense of coverage for a particular country’s data, the dataset includes two country-level variables: the last year the country was coded by a coder (so the lack of recently coded events may not indicate the absence of events in that country), and the number of student case studies that contribute to a country’s coded events (more case studies indicate a higher level of event coverage).

Our events are hand-coded by trained coders who transform qualitative descriptions of democratic erosion processes into discrete event types according to our analytic framework.

Events are identified from both student-written case studies as part of the Democratic Erosion university course and annual Freedom House country reports from 2000 onward (starting with v7).

Yes! You can download the dataset in .csv format by filling out the form here. You can also view the dataset on our data viewer and explore our data visualizations.

You can cite v6 of the dataset as follows:

Gottlieb, Jessica, Rob Blair, Hannah Baron, Aries Arugay, Cameron Ballard-Rosa, Grant Beatty, Berk Esen, Laura Gamboa, Guy Grossman, Shelby Grossman, Christina Kulich-Vamvakas, Nancy Lapp, Jennifer McCoy, Laura Paler, Sal Peralta, Adriana Qubaiova, Amanda Robinson, Steven Rosenzweig, Eric Royer, Cathy Lisa Schneider, Sue Stokes, Jason Todd, Megan Turnbull, and Julie Anne Weaver. 2023. “Democratic Erosion Event Dataset v6.” Democratic Erosion: A Cross-University Collaboration.

DEED was created in 2018 as an inductive exercise by a DEC capstone class led by Prof. Jessica Gottlieb to develop an analytical framework for classifying democratic erosion events in partnership with USAID. You can access the capstone reports from 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Then, students enrolled in the Democratic Erosion Course completed case study assignments documenting democratic erosion in a country of interest, which were then hand-coded into discrete events to build out the DEED.

Our Student Fellowship Program has been instrumental in continuing to code events, build the dataset, study it and make improvements.

Going forward, we have included other data sources, including the narratives of the Annual Freedom House country reports.

You can fill out our comment form here. We welcome any and all feedback and suggestions.