Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED)

DEED v7, which includes 22,507 events related to democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation across 152 countries. We generally publish a new DEED version every year. You can sign up to our listserve to receive updates about DEED.

DEED v7 includes 22,507 events related to democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation across 152 countries from 2000 to 2023.

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 v7 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 (note these are based on v6 and will be updated to use v7 data shortly).

You can cite v7 of the dataset as follows:

Gottlieb, Jessica, Rodrigo Balvanera, Hannah Baron, Robert A. Blair, Laura Paler, and Julie Anne Weaver. 2025. “Democratic Erosion Event Dataset v7.” Democratic Erosion Consortium: 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.