In this paper, we consider domain decomposition preconditioners for a system of linear algebraic equations arising from the <i>p</i>-version of the fem. We propose several multi-level preconditioners for the Dirichlet problems in the sub-domains in two and three dimensions. It is proved that the condition number of the preconditioned system is bounded by a constant independent of the polynomial degree. The proof uses interpretations of the <i>p</i>-version element stiffness matrix and mass matrix on [-1,1] as <i>h</i>-version stiffness matrix and weighted mass matrix. The analysis requires wavelet methods.