South African Democracy Expert Survey (SADES) 2021

Description:
The data set measures the views of experts on South African democracy drawing from the relevant indicators of the Varieties of Democracy (V- Dem) project, which include accountability, civil and political liberties, elections and campaigns, the right to franchise, separation of powers, voter participation, civic education, equality before the law, ethical political elite behaviour and political tolerance.

Of the targeted population of 159, 51 responses (32%) were realised.

The data set contains 57 variables and 51 cases.
Abstract:
Given that existing global measures of democratic performance suffer from notable shortcomings, the Chicago Centre of Democracy (CCD) intends to construct a new index that is simpler, more transparent, and uses a more rational aggregation technique to assess democratic health in a country. The aim is for this index to be simple enough that non-technical individuals can understand it. This project addresses a gap in the availability of tools that track improvements in and regressions of democratic performance. In particular, the project focuses on insufficiencies in three interrelated areas of cross-national tracking of democracy:

1. Global measurement of democratic performance - Various societal actors have a need for accurate tracking of national democratic health. These include civil society organizations, multilateral organizations, governmental foreign ministries, journalists, and others. Yet existing democracy indices are extremely complex, use simplistic aggregation methodologies, and have difficulty explaining why scores change year to year. Each of these stakeholder groups has the potential to benefit from a new, robust, transparent democratic performance index.

2. Rhetorical strategies of populist leaders - A growing number of elected leaders come into office through democratic means, but then proceed to threaten democratic institutions without overly violating the law. How are voters and watchdog groups to know that such politicians represent a threat before they come to power? With the right type of analysis, the campaign statements of politicians can provide clues. By using a machine learning approach to analyse the campaign speeches of politicians across a dozen countries, CCD will create a tool that will allow users to see rhetorical patterns within and across speeches from politicians around the world.

3. The role of referendums - Referendums are often considered a tool of "direct democracy", in that they provide the voting population a direct say in matters of policy importance. However, many questions are unanswered about referendums, such as why they are initiated, the role of special interest groups, and why the results are often considered suboptimal. CCD will create a publicly available database of national referendums from 1960 to present, organized by category, country, results, and other variables. This tool will help those involved in designing or campaigning for referendums to understand how they can be structured and implemented most effectively.

The CCD aims to complete regional surveys in seven countries: Brazil, Peru, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom to create a set of composite weightings of the democratic principles, such that CCD will develop scores for nearly every country in the world drawing on expert surveys.