World Addiction Medicine Reports : formation of the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) Global Expert Network (ISAM-GEN) and Its global surveys

Funding: All the infrastructure funding of this initiative is supported by the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM). We will be open to fundraising for specific projects within the platform and future collaboration with external partners.Addiction medicine is a dynamic field that encompasses clinical practice and research in the context of societal, economic, and cultural factors at the local, national, regional, and global levels. This field has evolved profoundly during the past decades in terms of scopes and activities with the contribution of addiction medicine scientists and professionals globally. The dynamic nature of drug addiction at the global level has resulted in a crucial need for developing an international collaborative network of addiction societies, treatment programs and experts to monitor emerging national, regional, and global concerns. This protocol paper presents methodological details of running longitudinal surveys at national, regional, and global levels through the Global Expert Network of the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM-GEN). The initial formation of the network with a recruitment phase and a round of snowball sampling provided 354 experts from 78 countries across the globe. In addition, 43 national/regional addiction societies/associations are also included in the database. The surveys will be developed by global experts in addiction medicine on treatment services, service coverage, co-occurring disorders, treatment standards and barriers, emerging addictions and/or dynamic changes in treatment needs worldwide. Survey participants in categories of (1) addiction societies/associations, (2) addiction treatment programs, (3) addiction experts/clinicians and (4) related stakeholders will respond to these global longitudinal surveys. The results will be analyzed and cross-examined with available data and peer-reviewed for publication.Peer reviewe

Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset: Political Institutions in the Long 19th Century

The Historical Varieties of Democracy Dataset (Historical V-Dem) is a new dataset containing about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally – including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies – from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators are also included in the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers the period from 1900 to the present – and together these two datasets cover the bulk of “modern history”. Historical V-Dem also includes several new indicators, covering features that are pertinent for 19th century polities. We describe the data, the process of coding, and the different strategies employed in Historical V-Dem to cope with issues of reliability and validity and ensure inter-temporal- and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we provide a descriptive account of patterns of democratization in the “long 19th century.” Finally, we perform an empirical investigation of how inter-state war relates to subsequent democratization.We gratefully acknowledge coding efforts and other research assistance provided by Solveig Bjørkholt, Ben Chatterton, Vlad Ciobanu, Lee Cojocaru, Vilde Lunnan Djuve, Kristian Frederiksen, Sune Orloff Hellegaard, Bernardo Isola, Sindre Haugen, Haakon Haugevik Jernsletten, Claudia Maier, Swaantje Marten, Selemon Negash, Moa Olin, Konstantinos Skenteri, and Katharina Sibbers; help with constructing vignettes by Amanda Haraldsson, Kersti Hazell and Alexander Kuhn; assistance with implementing the measurement model by Joshua Krusell and Johannes von Römer; and help with creating expert surveys, managing the data, coordinating, discussing and resolving conceptual and technical issues, etc., by numerous people at the V-Dem Institute in Gothenburg, including Frida Andersson, Staffan I. Lindberg, Valeriya Mechkova, Moa Olin, Josefine Pernes, Laura Saxer, and Natalia Stepanova. We also thank our country experts and numerous scholars (who are too many to mention), both inside and outside the wider V-Dem team, for inputs at various stages in the process. Finally, we acknowledge funding from various larger and smaller grants for the data collection for Historical V-Dem (see V-Dem Organization and Management document for details). The two largest sources of funding were Swedish Research Council Grant 421-2014-1283, PI: Jan Teorell, Department of Political Science, Lund University and Norwegian Research Council Grant pnr 240505, PI: Carl Henrik Knutsen, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. Another main funding source was Innovationsfonden Grant 4110-00002B, PI: Svend-Erik Skaaning, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. Further, the V-Dem data collection was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13-0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; as well as by internal grants from the Vice-Chancellor’s office, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences, and the Department of Political Science at University of Gothenburg. We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden, SNIC 2017/1-407 and 2017/1-68. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems

V-Dem: A New Way to Measure Democracy

In the last few decades, Western governments have spent huge sums of money to promote democracy abroad. We do not know which, if any, of these programs actually work. If we cannot measure democracy in sufficient detail and with the necessary nuance, we cannot mark its progress and setbacks or affect its future course. While distinguishing the most democratic countries from the least democratic ones is fairly easy, it has proven to be much harder to make finer distinctions. Here we present a new effort aimed at measuring democracy, the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem)

Varieties of Political Indoctrination in Education and the Media (V-Indoc) Dataset V1

The dataset presents a wide array of unique and detailed indices and indicators on indoctrination efforts in education and the media across 160 countries from 1945-2021