DeVoteD

The perception of a constant decline in voter turnout fosters doubts about the health of a democracy, given the crucial role of voting. Therefore, regardless of the results that the vote determines, we have focused on the action of the vote itself to measure how much it affects the strength of a democracy. We assumed different point of views on the voting in order to have a broader picture on the phenomenon and we also used democracy indeces useful to asses the quality of a democracy.

To gather all the data needed to produce a reliable work, we looked for up-to-date, coherent and open data sets. Each of them was analysed by examining their technical, legal, ethical and sustainability characteristics. The data was used to perform visualizations (Visualisations) and analysis. KNIME, the open source platform for data analysis and reporting, has been used to manage datasets. To improve sharablity and transparency we produced descriptive metadata about the entire project and the resources used. See Metadata. You can see our workflow right below this section. But the full description and all details of our project can be read in the Documentation.

Workflow

Walk through the development of DeVoteD

Formulating Hypothesis

The project DeVoteD started from a question: how can we evaluate a democracy? Given that an exhaustive answer to this question would requires a variety of analysis and research, we decided to focus on one of the possible clues that could be helpful, if not a starting point, for a complete answer. So, question became: What the exercise of voting right can tell us about a democracy? Or more precisely: how much democratic values are influenced by votes turnouts and distribution?

Searching Data

For analysing our hypothesis, we needed data with a focus on votes turnouts and distribution, democracy indeces. We succeeded in the search of pre-existing datasets. The data was retrieved from well-established institutes.

Data provider:

For detailed information about the individual datasets, visit the subpage Metadata. You can find all the used datasets in our GitHub repository folder [aggiungere link ai dataset della repository] datasets.

Asserting Issues

Reusing data and publishing data requires a high degree of sensibility. When handling data asserting legal and ethical issues is obligatory. Also, analysing economical and sustainable aspects is vital for the long term success of the project. We have looked into all of those issues for the retrieved data and noted the results in the Documentation.

Mashing Data

Answering our research question required to combine the individual datasets. After asserting possible issues and deciding which data we can use, we have performed a mashup of the files. The process included aligning institute specific naming conventions for nations by the ISO 3166 standard. After the alignment, the files were mergeable based on the country names. You can find all our Python code for the mashup in our GitHub repository folder code.

Analysing

Once we had combined our datasets and obtained our own catalogue, we based our analysis on the following variables:

V-Dem Democratic indices:

Liberal Democracy Index
Polyarchy Index
Participatory Democracy Index
Deliberative Democray Index
Egalitarian Democray Index

Voter Behaviour data:

Voter Turnout
Voter concentration measures:

Given the temporal discontinuity of electoral data, we decided to aggregate the values of these variables by decade.

Publication

For the publication we used two kinds of visualisations, allowing distinct exploration modes.

The first one is spatial, based on an interactive map with filtering controls, encouraging to compare different countries in the world within a certain decade and according to a certain variable.

The second one is time-based, with a barchart which displays the relationships of two variables for a certain country over all the decades from 1940s to the 2010s.

For exploring the visualisations, visit the subpage Visualisations.

Preparing Afterlife

Our data and code – everything we produced – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. We encourage the research community to build on our results and to continue the work. Realistically speaking, we do not have any resources for maintenance or for closing the lifecycle. However, we would love to see the work being continued.

Exploring the voting impact on democracy indeces

Data-Driven analysis on the impact of voting

Workflow