In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.

Reasoned and impassioned controversy have accompanied The Social Contract since its publication in 1762. Once the book entered conversations about the foundations and ends of modern politics, it never left them.

Immanuel Kant’s debt to Rousseau, for example, was deep and multidimensional. He drew many of his own ethical and political arguments from contemplating Rousseau’s philosophy, including the general will and other ideas that extended well beyond the portrait of Rousseau that famously adorned his otherwise sparsely decorated study.

Rousseau’s Social Contract begins with breathtakingly ambitious declarations about freedom and justice. Yet the project comes to an abrupt end, and the manuscript remains a fragment. Given that Rousseau sees daring arguments to their end elsewhere, why was this particular project – one so close to the core of his thought – abandoned? On the surface, the Social Contract appears beset by contradictions, but it pursues its conclusions toward an intricate and audacious coherence, giving an account of ancient political orders to overcome what Rousseau understands as misapprehensions associated with the Enlightenment. Yet it is not the Enlightenment, but Christianity that inaugurates the break with and confusions of ancient political distinctions. An attempt to confront this origin directly shatters Rousseau’s penultimately profound coherence. In remarkable congruence with patterns of figurative language developed in Descartes, Rousseau seeks to both ground and energize his account of political life by deploying diverse, often distinctly modern aspirations and metaphors in order to escape the Christian interruption of proper political ordering and concludes he cannot do so.

Scholars and policy makers need systematic assessments of the validity of the measures produced by V-Dem. In Chapter 6, we present our approach to comparative data validation – the set of steps we take to evaluate the precision, accuracy, and reliability of our measures, both in isolation and compared to extant measures of the same concepts. Our approach assesses the degree to which measures align with shared concepts (content validation), shared rules of translation (data generation assessment), and shared realities (convergent validation). Within convergent validity, we execute two convergent validity tests. First, we examine convergent validity as it is typically conceived – examining convergence between V-Dem measures and extant measures. Second, we evaluate the level of convergence across coders, considering the individual coder and country traits that predict coder convergence. Throughout the chapter, we focus on three indices included in the V-Dem data set: polyarchy, corruption, and core civil society. These three concepts collectively provide a “hard test” for the validity of our data, representing a range of existing measurement approaches, challenges, and solutions.

This chapter sets forth the conceptual scheme for the V–Dem project. We begin by discussing the concept of democracy. Next, we lay out seven principles by which this key concept may be understood – electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Each defines a “variety“ of democracy, and together they offer a fairly comprehensive accounting of the concept as used in the world today. Next, we show how this seven-part framework fits into our overall thinking about democracy, including multiple levels of disaggregation – to components, subcomponents, and indicators. The final section of the chapter discusses several important caveats and clarifications pertaining to this ambitious taxonomic exercise.

This chapter recounts how a project of this scale came together and why it has succeeded. Five main factors were responsible for V–Dem’s success: timing, inclusion, deliberation, administrative centralization, and fund–raising. First, planning for V-Dem began at a time when both social scientists and practitioners were realizing that they needed better democracy measures. This made it possible to recruit collaborators and find funding. Second, the leaders of the project were always eager to expand the team to acquire whatever expertise they lacked and share credit with everyone who contributed. Third, the project leaders practiced an intensely deliberative decision–making style to ensure that all points of view were consulted and only decisions that won wide acceptance were adopted. Fourth, centralizing the execution of the agreed–upon tasks helped tremendously by streamlining processes and promoting standardization, documentation, professionalization, and coordination of a large number of intricate steps. Finally, successful fund–raising from a mix of both research foundations and bilateral and multilateral organizations has been critical.

In this chapter we focus on the measurement of five key principles of democracy – electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. For each principle, we discuss (1) the theoretical rationale for the selected indicators, (2) whether these indicators are correlated strongly enough to warrant being collapsed into an index, and (3) the justification of aggregation rules for moving from indicators to components and from components to higher–level indices. In each section we also (4) highlight the top– and bottom–five countries on each principle of democracy in early (1812 or 1912) and late (2012) years of our sample period, as well as the aggregate trend over the whole time period 1789–2017 (where applicable). Finally, we (5) look at how the different principles are intercorrelated in order to assess the trade–offs involved between the conceptual parsimony achieved by aggregating to a few general concepts and the retention of useful variation permitted by aggregating less.

Four characteristics of V-Dem data present distinct opportunities and challenges for explanatory analysis: (1) the large number of democracy indicators (i.e., variables), (2) the measurement of concepts by multiple coders filtered through the V-Dem measurement model, (3) the large number of years in the data set, and 4) the ex ante potential for dependence across countries (generically referred to as spatial dependence). This chapter discusses 3 challenges and 10 opportunities that are implied by these characteristics. At the end of this chapter, we also discuss three assumptions that are implicit in most analyses of observational indicators of macro-features at the national level, which aim to draw conclusions about causal relationships.