Michael J. Coppedge

Faculty Fellow, Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Coppedge is one of the Principal Investigators for the Varieties of Democracy project (V-Dem), which has measured hundreds of attributes of democracy and governance for most countries since 1789 and won the APSA Comparative Politics Section's 2016 "Best Dataset" prize. He is co-editor of Why Democracies Develop and Decline (Cambridge, 2022), co-author of Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change (Cambridge, 2020), and author of Democratization and Research Methods (Cambridge, 2012) and Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy and Factionalism in Venezuela (Stanford, 1994). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Politics, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, Democratization, Party Politics, other journals, and various books. He argues for the complementarity of large- and small-sample research and qualitative and quantitative methods and is now using V-Dem data to analyze dimensions of democracy and international influences on democracy. He taught at Yale, Johns Hopkins-SAIS, and Princeton, before coming to Notre Dame.