electricsheepafrica/africa-the-global-state-of-democracy-indices-for-select-countries

The Global State of Democracy Indices for select countries

Publisher: The Charter Project · Source: OpenAfrica · License: cc-by · Updated: 2023-04-11

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Abstract

The Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD Indices) measure democratic trends at the country, regional and global levels across a broad range of different attributes of democracy in the period 1975–2020. They do not provide a single index of democracy.

Each row in this dataset represents first-level administrative unit observations. Data was last updated on OpenAfrica on 2023-04-11. Geographic scope: BENIN, BOTSWANA, CAPE-VERDE, ETHIOPIA, KENYA, NIGERIA, SENEGAL, SOUTH-AFRICA, and 3 others.

Curated into ML-ready Parquet format by Electric Sheep Africa.

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Dataset Characteristics

Domain	Humanitarian and development data
Unit of observation	First-level administrative unit observations
Rows (total)	10,247
Columns	6 (2 numeric, 4 categorical, 0 datetime)
Train split	8,197 rows
Test split	2,049 rows
Geographic scope	BENIN, BOTSWANA, CAPE-VERDE, ETHIOPIA, KENYA, NIGERIA, SENEGAL, SOUTH-AFRICA, and 3 others
Publisher	The Charter Project
OpenAfrica last updated	2023-04-11

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Variables

Geographic — the_global_state_of_democracy_indices_1975_2021 (range 1975.0–2021.0).

Identifier / Metadata — unnamed_1 (Botswana, Nigeria, Sudan), unnamed_2 (Civil Liberties, Representative Government, Direct Democracy), unnamed_3 (range 0.0–1.0), esa_source (HDX), esa_processed (2026-04-28).

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Quick Start

from datasets import load_dataset

ds    = load_dataset("electricsheepafrica/africa-the-global-state-of-democracy-indices-for-select-countries")
train = ds["train"].to_pandas()
test  = ds["test"].to_pandas()

print(train.shape)
train.head()

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Schema

Column	Type	Null %	Range / Sample Values
the_global_state_of_democracy_indices_1975_2021	float64	0.0%	1975.0 – 2021.0 (mean 1998.1295)
unnamed_1	object	0.0%	Botswana, Nigeria, Sudan
unnamed_2	object	0.0%	Civil Liberties, Representative Government, Direct Democracy
unnamed_3	float64	0.0%	0.0 – 1.0 (mean 0.4869)
esa_source	object	0.0%	HDX
esa_processed	object	0.0%	2026-04-28

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Numeric Summary

Column	Min	Max	Mean	Median
the_global_state_of_democracy_indices_1975_2021	1975.0	2021.0	1998.1295	1998.0
unnamed_3	0.0	1.0	0.4869	0.5171

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Curation

Raw data was downloaded from OpenAfrica via the CKAN API and converted to Parquet. Column names were lowercased and standardised to snake_case. Common missing-value markers (N/A, null, none, -, unknown, no data, #N/A) were unified to NaN. 2 column(s) were cast from string to numeric or datetime based on parse-success rate (>85% threshold). The dataset was split 80/20 into train and test partitions using a fixed random seed (42) and saved as Snappy-compressed Parquet.

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Limitations

• Data originates from The Charter Project and has not been independently validated by ESA.
• Automated cleaning cannot correct for misreported values, definitional inconsistencies, or sampling bias in the original collection.
• This dataset spans 11 countries; geographic and methodological inconsistencies across national boundaries may affect cross-country comparability.
• Refer to the original HDX dataset page for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

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Citation

@dataset{openafrica_africa_the_global_state_of_democracy_indices_for_select_countries,
  title     = {The Global State of Democracy Indices for select countries},
  author    = {The Charter Project},
  year      = {2023},
  url       = {https://open.africa/dataset/the-global-state-of-democracy-indices-for-select-countries},
  note      = {Repackaged for machine learning by Electric Sheep Africa (https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica)}
}

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Electric Sheep Africa — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.