DFI: Democratic Fitness Indicator for 20 Countries

Twenty countries are evaluated by the Democratic Fitness Indicator (DFI), a diagnostic framework for evaluating the legal architecture of democratic political systems. The dataset includes framework specifications, scoring guidelines, and per-country research files created by Marcin Gerwin, last updated on 2026-05-09. It aims to answer to what extent citizens hold power across seven categories including elections and constitutional change.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking democratic legal frameworks across nations based on the seven DFI categories.
• Scoring a country's democratic fitness deterministically using the provided Python application and YAML inputs.
• Researching specific democratic mechanisms like citizens' assemblies or referenda using the included per-country files.
• Comparing electoral systems and accountability measures between the twenty covered countries.

Strengths

• Includes materials for twenty specific countries, such as the USA, Mexico, and Germany.
• Provides an open-source Python application for deterministic score generation from structured inputs.
• Framework covers seven distinct diagnostic categories for a multi-faceted assessment.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

Marcin Gerwin via figshare

Collection Method

Research and framework development, likely involving legal and political analysis.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-09 16:00:39; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Twenty countries: USA, Mexico, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, South Korea, South Africa, United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Netherlands, Latvia, Poland, Botswana, Germany, Spain, Kenya.