Dataset provenance
V-Dem Data Used by the Atlas
The committed 2026 score table identifies V-Dem Country-Year Full+Others v15 as its source and uses 2024 country-year observations. The large raw CSV is not redistributed in this repository.
Published score provenance
V-Dem v15
Full+Others country-year file; observation year 2024.
Current update workflow
V-Dem v16
Core is sufficient for current fields; Full+Others is also accepted.
Download and rebuild
- For the committed release vintage, open the official V-Dem archive and obtain Country-Year Full+Others v15 in CSV format.
- For a current-data update, open the official dataset page and choose Country-Year Core v16.
- Extract the CSV into
data/raw/using the matching v15 or v16 filename. - Run
python3 -m src.build_atlas --year 2026 --eta 0.30.
Use the codebook distributed with the chosen dataset; the official v16 codebook documents the current release. V-Dem model-estimate columns are latent interval estimates, not original 0–4 coder categories.
Replication boundary: a v16 rebuild is a refreshed analysis and may revise scores because V-Dem re-estimates historical values between releases. Bit-for-bit replication requires the exact archived v15 source file and its checksum; that checksum is not present in the repository.