Replication paper Internet Use and Understanding Democracy in Africa

Using Afrobarometer Round 6 data (2014), this paper studies how reliance on the Internet and social networks as information sources affects individuals’ understanding of democracy, prioritizing open-ended responses analyzed with ChatGPT to capture conceptual knowledge. Causal identification exploits exogenous variation in Internet access generated by lightning-induced disruptions interacting with 3G coverage. Internet use is associated on average with a negative bias in democratic understanding—especially in high-censorship environments—while it has positive effects in low-censorship contexts, implying that the political impact of Internet diffusion depends critically on media openness.Replication StepsOverviewThis repository contains all data and code required to reproduce the empirical results, tables, and figures presented in the paper.The package includes:Processed Afrobarometer Round 6 survey data (2014–2015) used in the analysisMerged external datasets (V-Dem v13, Polity5, Freedom on the Net, COLDAT, World Bank GDP)A master estimation notebook that reproduces all resultsFilesDatadf_survey_afrobarometer.csv – processed survey microdata with constructed variables, instrument measures (lightning × 3G), and merged controlsV-Dem-CY-Full+Others-v13.csv – democracy and corruption indicatorsp5v2018.xls – Polity5 regime scoresfreedom_of_net.xlsx – internet freedom scoresCOLDAT_dyads.csv – colonial history datagdp_data.csv – GDP per capita (constant 2015 USD)Codeevaluate/01_estimate.ipynb – master replication notebook (SOS kernel; Python and R).Running this file sequentially reproduces all regressions, robustness checks, tables, and figures in the paper.RequirementsPython (≥3.8): sos-notebook, pandas, numpy, pandas_datareaderR (≥4.0): tidyverse, lfe, readxl, haven, progressInstall SOS Notebook:pip install sos-notebookpython -m sos_notebook.installReplication InstructionsDownload the repository.Ensure all data files are in the same directory structure.Open 01_estimate.ipynb with the SOS kernel.Run all cells from top to bottom.Data SourcesAll datasets originate from publicly available sources (Afrobarometer, V-Dem Institute, Center for Systemic Peace, Freedom House, Harvard Dataverse, World Bank, NASA LIS/VHRFC). Users remain responsible for complying with original data licensing terms.