DFI: Democratic Fitness Indicator for 20 Countries
by Marcin Gerwin·Updated 28d ago
5.0 MB1files
Available on 1 platform
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Description
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.
Files are packaged in a ZIP archive. Requires Python to use the DFI Builder application.