Systematic and people-oriented
methods for strategy, improvement and innovation
Analytical tools to study the evolution of democracy: the "flower chart"
April 22nd 2022, by Michael Ohler
What this study is about
For the previous two studies, I have explored data that are made avaiable by the State of Democracy website. With 5 attributes, 3+4+4+3+2 sub-attributes, 8 sub-sub-attributes and 116 indices the dataset is both impressively rich and confusing to a novice.
In this study, I experiment with a graphical interface to explore all these data at once, either for a given country or a group of countries. For that purpose, I arrange attributes and indices in a “flower-chart”, inspired by the artwork used by the State of Democracy team.
What still needs to be fixed is to display the labels of all these attributes and indices.
1 All indices and attributes, averaged for the world
The following chart averages all indices over the world population. For that purpose, a given index is weighted by the population of the countries. We see that some indices (outer ring) are more developed than others (yellow). We also notice that “direct democracy” is least developed:
Figure 1.1: The 5 attributes, 16 sub-attributes, 8 sub-sub-attributes and 116 indices tracked by State of Democracy. The values for all countries displayed here as global average, weighted by the size of the population.
2 Indices for one country
In the following we study a few countries:
Figure 2.1: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.2: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.3: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.4: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.5: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.6: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.7: Flower-plot for one country.
Figure 2.8: Flower-plot for one country.
3 Still do do
For a given year, the “flower-chart” functionality provides a good overview over all indices. What still needs to be implemented is:
- Print the names of the indices on the chart; some re-arrangement of the circles is probably needed for that
- Allow for a mouse-over-effect for an html-based report (which is easier to read than all labels printed on the graph)
- Add connection lines to the graph between indices and their “parent attribute” (only needed for the “V_…” indices).