Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualization and measurement of democracy. It is co-hosted by the University of Gothenburg and University of Notre Dame. With a V-Dem Institute at University of Gothenburg with almost ten staff, and a project team across the world with four Principal Investigators, fifteen Project Managers (PMs), 30+ Regional Managers, 170 Country Coordinators, Research Assistants, and 2,500 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest ever social science research-oriented data collection programs.Please address comments and/or queries for information to:
AbstractIncreasing the diversity of political institutions is believed to improve the quality of political discourse and, subsequently, the quality of political outcomes. Moreover, the presence of diverse officials in positions of power signals the openness and fairness of political institutions. These benefits of diversity should be particularly acute in the judiciary, where judges are tasked with the symbolically and substantively powerful duty of interpreting and defending constitutional values. Extant scholarship suggests that well-designed appointment process can promote diversity without explicitly gendered goals, much less quotas. If correct, these proposals raise the possibility of promoting greater diversity without having to resolve politically charged debates about quotas. Yet, scholars disagree about the effects of particular design choices. Worse, estimating causal effects of institutions in observational data is particularly difficult. We develop a research design linked to the empirical implications of existing theoretical arguments to evaluate the effect of institutional change on the gender diversity of peak courts cross-nationally. Specifically, we consider the effect of an increase (or a decrease) in the number of actors involved in the appointment process. We find mixed results for any existing claim about the role of appointment institutions play in increasing diversity. Yet we also find that any institutional change seems to cause an increase in the gender diversity of peak courts. The world's peak courts, by which we refer to high ordinary courts or constitutional courts, are increasingly staffed by women (Hoekstra, 2010;Hoekstra, Kittilson and Bond, 2014;Turquet, 2011). Within the last decade, gender parity or near parity has been reached on the national high courts of Angola, Australia, Canada, Ecuador, Rwanda, Serbia, and Slovenia. Women are increasingly serving as presidents of prestigious courts known internationally for their innovative jurisprudence, including the Supreme Courts of Canada and Israel as well as the Constitutional Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court. This pattern is notable for a number of reasons. The presence of more women on peak courts may influence the law, and by implication, core matters of public policy, either because women understand the law in particular contexts or evaluate facts differently than men (e.g. Boyd, Epstein and Martin, 2010;Glynn and S...