---
annotations_creators:
- no-annotation
language_creators:
- found
language:
- en
license: cc-by-4.0
multilinguality:
- monolingual
size_categories:
- 10K<n<100K
source_datasets:
- original
task_categories:
- tabular-regression
task_ids: []
tags:
- africa
- humanitarian
- hdx
- electric-sheep-africa
- democratic-culture
- political-pluralism
- benin
- botswana
- cape-verde
- ethiopia
- kenya
pretty_name: "The Global State of Democracy Indices for select countries"
dataset_info:
  splits:
    - name: train
      num_examples: 8197
    - name: test
      num_examples: 2049
---

# The Global State of Democracy Indices for select countries

**Publisher:** The Charter Project · **Source:** [OpenAfrica](https://open.africa/dataset/the-global-state-of-democracy-indices-for-select-countries) · **License:** `cc-by` · **Updated:** 2023-04-11

---

## 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](https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica).*

---

## 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 |

---

## 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).

---

## Quick Start

```python
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()
```

---

## 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 |

---

## 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 |

---

## 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.

---

## 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](https://open.africa/dataset/the-global-state-of-democracy-indices-for-select-countries) for the publisher's own methodology notes and caveats.

---

## Citation

```bibtex
@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)}
}
```

---

*[Electric Sheep Africa](https://huggingface.co/electricsheepafrica) — Africa's ML dataset infrastructure. Lagos, Nigeria.*