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The Everyday Democracy Index

The Everyday Democracy Index Picture

Measuring empowerment in everyday life across Europe

What are the most democratic countries in Europe? How would we find out? We could look at electoral turnouts. But while elections matter, Demos doesn’t believe that democracy is something that should start and finish at the ballot box.

 That’s why we’re developing the Everyday Democracy Index (EDI). EDI is a tool for assessing the democratic health of European countries across many different dimensions. That includes the formal dimensions of democracy, like procedural rights and election turnout. But it also includes more everyday features of democracy – how important democratic principles and practices are to the cultures of workplaces, to people’s community life, to the way they interact with public services, and even to the way they talk to their friends and family.

Launch of the Everyday Democracy Index

Posted by Kirsten Bound at 5:26pm on Friday, 1st February 2008

Yesterday evening Demos was jam-packed for the launch of the Everyday Democracy Index. Paul Skidmore unveiled the first exciting set of results, with an engaging response from Professor Timothy Garton Ash.

Rather than relying solely on traditional democratic indicators like electoral turnout, the EDI also measures how good countries are at empowering their citizens in everyday spheres of life like neighbourhoods and communities, workplaces, public services and even the family.

If you want to see the geographical patterns in empowerment across Europe, or learn why Britain has the second biggest gap between personal and collective optimism (the ‘i’m ok – they’re not’ syndrome) you can read the pamphlet, but you should also check out our interactive website. It shows you how we made the index, and lets you pull it apart, put it together again and feed back to us what you did. The graphics are a bit fancy-dan, so you may need to update your browser or get a cheeky plug in.

If all that sounds too much like hard work, why not listen to a podcast interview with the authors  over on the podcast page.

This is just the beginning for the EDI, so watch this space...

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