 Hello, and welcome to the Global State of Democracy Indices website walkthrough. My name is Joe Nunez, I'm an associate program officer with International Idea, and we're going to be looking at the website of the Global State of Democracy Indices today. We won't be talking too much about the methodology of the indices, but rather go through each of the features of the website and teach you how you can get data from the website. The Global State of Democracy Indices is a measurement of democracy that we've developed an international idea. It measures democracy on five different attributes. You can see them on the left-hand side here, representative of government, fundamental rights, checks on government, impartial administration, and participatory engagement. It gives scores for every country and year from 1975 to 2017. Currently we only have data up to 2015 on the website, but later this year, later in 2018, we will have data going up to 2017. It includes data on all countries that have over one million people, so 158 countries. So to start with the website, you can go to the top right-hand corner here, and you can get an about section. This gives you an overview of the Global State of Democracy Indices, basically what I have just said, but in written form. You can also see the different attributes, the sub-attributes, and the assessment questions. So what the sub-attributes actually measure. This is a useful tool if you want a quick overview of what the indices are. If you want a little bit more detail, you can go to the data set and resources tab. Here we have the data set itself, so an Excel file or a CSV file that is about 6,000 rows long and about 200 rows wide. So it's a kind of a very complex, very big data set, and that's why we built the website is because we want to make it a little bit more accessible for people who do not have the time or the technical knowledge to go through and make dry out data. We also have the Global State of Democracy's Indices methodology here. This is a very important report or outline of how we made the indices, the conceptual distinctions, the theoretical frameworks, and how it all fits together statistically. This is where you want to go if you want in-depth explanation about which certain attributes or sub-attributes measure, or if you want more general knowledge about the methodology of the indices, it's very comprehensive. We also have the Technical Procedures Guide, which is a bit more step-by-step of how we did anything, which could be useful if you want to take the analysis a bit further or learn on your own about how to construct indices. The Codebook has information about all of the variables in the GSOD indices. So this would be an essential Codebook to have if you're playing with the data that you've downloaded on the Excel formats or the SPSS format. We also have some kind of quicker ways to get information. We have a Quick Facts, which is just a really quick explanation of the indices in about two pages. The Annex of the Global State of Democracy's publication provides a summarized methodology along with some useful tools about how to use confidence intervals, for instance. So I would recommend reading that if you want to know more about confidence intervals. Lastly, we have a Geographical Definitions of Regions in the Global State of Democracy Indices. The other tab that we have is the Frequently Asked Questions. So these questions have been harvested from different seminars we've had, different talks, and we've gotten questions from participants, and we've reflected them onto this website. So if you have a question, hopefully most of them will be answered here. For instance, why there's not a single democracy score, why certain countries are excluded, and how you should analyze the data. But if there isn't a question that you don't see up here, you can email us at gsod.indices at idea.int. And we'll answer your question, and then we'll add it to the Frequently Asked Questions. So again, that's gsod.indices at idea.int. So if you want to go back to the visualization page, you can just click in the top left corner here. So we'll go to the Global State of Democracies Indices button. So we start out with the World Map. The World Map is a good way to get a really quick overview of how countries are doing what their state of democracy is. On the different visualization tabs, we'll have a section at the top here that gives some information, some pointers, that you'll get to see the first time you visit the website. So I'm just going to take that away there. So on the top left side, you can choose the attributes. So let's take a look at Representative Government. The tooltips here, beneath the little question marks, give you a little explanation about what each of the attributes actually measures. So here, Representative Government measures free and equal access to political power, fundamental rights, it measures individual liberties and resources. And we have a tooltip for each of the different attributes. So let's choose Representative Government. As you can see, when I click, you can also see the sub-attributes of Representative Government. So these are the different aspects that go into that score. So we have clean elections, inclusive suffrage, and so forth. So here's how the world in 2015 looks for Representative Government. The darker the score, the higher performance on the country has on Representative Government. You can see here on the right-hand side, the bottom right-hand side, there is a key. So the darker the score, the higher the score. All right, the darker the color, the higher the score, the better performance. So here you can kind of get a bird's eye view of the regions. So here you see that Russia, that Europe has pretty consistent scores. They're generally higher performing in Europe. They have above 0.75. You can see here Sweden has 0.85 in 2015. But then other regions have different levels of democracy in the region. If you look at Asia and the Pacific, for instance, you have some very high-performing countries such as New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India. But then you have some very low-performing countries such as China, which doesn't have electoral regimes at all. You can also go back in time if you're interested in seeing how certain regions look in the past. So let's go back all the way to 1975. Here you can see the colors have lightened up. The democracy scores are much lower in 1975 than they are in 2015. And you can use this to kind of, again, get a visual understanding of how the world looks on different attributes of democracy. You can choose any of the different attributes or sub-attributes to visualize. So here is absence of corruption. But if you want to go into a little bit more detail and maybe not have as many such a broad overview, you can go to the compare attributes and sub-attributes section. So here we're going to look at Latin America and the Caribbean. So you can choose regions, sub-regions, and countries when you visualize this. I've decided to visualize Latin America and the Caribbean as a region. So we're going to select fundamental rights on the left-hand side. And here you just get a simple line chart showing the trajectory of fundamental rights from 1975 to 2015. As you can see, the fundamental rights in 1975, if you hover over the line there, you can see the score was quite low, it was 0.35 in 1976. But you can change the time frame if it's more interesting for you. You can go to 1990 and see the expansion then. And you can see here in 2015, it went up to 0.60. So this is kind of a good way if you want to look at one region, sub-region, or country across one variable or one attribute or the sub-attributes underneath it. So here you can also visualize access to justice, civil liberties, and social rights and equality. And you can see that generally they have a general similar trajectory. I want to advise everyone not to compare scores against each other. For instance, it's not methodologically correct to say that civil liberties is higher than fundamental rights. They measure distinct concepts and the scales can sometimes be different. So you can compare the trends, you can say civil liberties has increased at the same time that fundamental rights has, but you can't directly compare them one to one. And it's because of this that we don't allow you to compare across attributes. So if I go to representative government, I can't visualize fundamental rights at the same time. You can only visualize one. And the reason behind that is that they're distinct concepts. Representative government captures things to do with electoral democracy, whereas fundamental rights captures things like social rights. And they're distinct concepts and we want to keep them separate and we don't want people to compare them directly. And you can see in the top corner here, or the top banner, we have a help button that explains basically what I just said, but if in case you forget, you can see that there. Now, if you want to look at the changes between regions and countries or if you want to compare different regions, we can go to the compare regions and countries tab. So here you choose one attribute or sub attribute and you compare it across a number of different countries or regions. So I'm going to select here, I'm going to select civil liberties, which is underneath the fundamental rights tab. And I'm going to take a look at East Africa, West Africa, and the overall score for Africa. And you can see here, you can use the search button to the top left or you can browse through. So it's nested so that the top level is the highest region or the biggest region. Then you have sub regions beneath it and underneath that you have countries. So for instance, if we wanted to see Kenya, we can visualize that as well. So here you have the trajectory of civil liberties across East Africa, West Africa, Africa, and Kenya. And you can see that generally there's been an improvement across all of regions. But you can see that West Africa has actually been the best performing region, sub region of Africa, whereas East Africa, although they've improved quite a lot, still have the ways to go to get to the African average. The shaded areas here are confidence intervals, which you can read more about in the annex of the publication. They essentially allow you to make statements about whether it's a statistically significant difference between any two lines or two regions or variables. It's important to learn a lot about those and to read about them if you want to make strong claims. For instance, saying that this country has seen a significant decrease. You want to learn more about those, which you can read about in the annex of the publication. So this is a useful tab. I think this is one of the most useful tabs that we have because it allows you to compare between regions. And it's important because the indices are a relative scale to get to understand how a country or region does compared to either the global average or a region that's relevant. For instance, here with Kenya, it's interesting that it's performing much higher than the East African average. And it's actually performing closer to the West African average and it's above the African average. If you just saw the score that Kenya had, which is about 0.771 in 2015, it would be hard to know what that actually means, whether it's high or low. So that's why it's very important to contextualize the data by looking at either relevant regions, relevant countries. So if you're comparing Kenya, look at how it compares to the East African average or the global average. So always try to do that wherever possible. But if you're a little pressed for time and you want to learn a bit more about how a certain country is doing, you can use the country region profiles. So let's take that Kenya example again and let's pull up Kenya. So here you have Kenya's scores in 2015. You have their scores for representative government, fundamental rights, checks on government, impartial administration, and the sub attributes underneath them. It's important to note that we don't have a single score for participatory engagement and that's why you don't see a score there. So again, here you can kind of get an overview of how the country is doing. It gives you a very quick overview and you can also compare to the past. So if you want to see what Kenya looked like in 1975, they have a bit lower scores on representative government. They only have a 0.38. You can see that in the purple right there. But now in 2015, they have a score of 0.62 that almost doubled. And again, we have a feature here that allows you to quickly compare the country performance to the regional and the global performance. So if you click on this, it'll bring in East Africa, Africa and the world. Again, this gives you more context. So now you can see that, okay, Kenya has a 6.62. I'm not sure exactly what that means in representative government. But I see now that it's much higher than the East African average, higher than the African average, and slightly above if not in par with the global average. So that's a really useful tool and it's important to really understanding and not misunderstanding the indices. But if you want something that's kind of quick, you want to take something on the go, you can use the download country profile button. Now this button will create a PDF of the selection that you have. So here we have Kenya in 2015. You have the scores here for 2015, like we just showed on the country profile tab. But you also have the trends over time. Again, we have the country level region and the global. So this is a useful tool if you are going to the country or if you really just need something quick to print out and take with you. And I would recommend using this as a place to go for those who need to save a bit of time. And of course, we have a quick description about the global state of democracy indices to help you understand what these different things actually mean. And one thing to note is that on all of the different charts, you can get the data behind it quite easily. If you click on the top right in this button here that looks like a table, you get the table of all the scores. So in this case, it's all of the attributes scores for 2015. So it's a short row with a lot of columns. But if you go to, for instance, the compare regions tab, you can do the same thing and you'll get a map with a table with Kenya, East Africa, West Africa, Africa, and their different civil liberties scores by year. So if you want to take this data, maybe you don't want to show the chart, but you want to show a table, you can easily just print this out and do or you can download it and do what you like with it. We also have a button where you can download all of the tables or all of the charts with the exception of the world map. So if you click the download chart button, it'll develop a chart that's presentation ready. So this is a quick overview of the, that was a quick overview of the Global State of Democracy Indices website. We will be updating it, as I said earlier with data from 2017 in the end of 2018. So we will have new data for you to analyze, but with the same structure of the website. Thank you, and if you have any questions, you can always email us at GSOD.indicesatidea.int. So that's GSOD.indicesatidea.int, thank you.