Democracy Tools: Illuminating key areas of democracy by Epi-interactive

How can we connect research on global democratic performance, political rhetoric, and referendums with a wide audience? The Democracy Tools dashboard uses interactive data visualisation to describe complex issues, study them further, and communicate about them to strengthen democracy around the world.

This dashboard developed by researchers at the Chicago Center on Democracy from the University of Chicago (USA) in collaboration with Epi-interactive Ltd. (New Zealand) empowers the research groups efforts to support democracy worldwide through the power of knowledge dissemination. Since the process by which democracies decline is subtle and often not well understood, the customised application aims to help users to study, track, and predict democratic functioning and erosion in countries around the world and makes research on democratic performance widely accessible.

A large research effort titled “Developing a Global Early-Warning System for Democratic Erosion” has provided the evidence base for three self-study online tools covering key areas of democratic functioning:

1) Tracking global democratic performance – An index of global performance on democracy. Study the quality of democracy in any country in any year.

2) Analyzing the rhetorical strategies of politicians – Study campaign speeches to analyze rhetorical strategies, compare similarities across politicians, and detect risks of democratic erosion.

3) Understanding the role of referendums in healthy democracies – Explore data related to national-level referendums over the past half century.

The dashboard is presented at https://www.epi-interactive.com/work/democracy-tools/