About DDI

The Democracy Discourse Index (DDI) is a research methodology designed to measure the quality of democratic discourse in online spaces. In its Second Edition — the Comment Edition — the DDI analyses the public comments citizens leave in response to news media reports across four key dimensions: Empathy, Civility, Trust, and Agency. This provides quantifiable insights into how people actually engage with one another on issues of public importance.

The central question the DDI seeks to answer is: "Does this comment contribute to or detract from the quality of democratic discourse?" The methodology focuses on discourse quality rather than political content, enabling objective assessment across different cultural and political contexts. Adjudicated coding becomes the ground truth that trains ReHuman, the project's AI model, to measure discourse at scale.

The DDI is a collaborative project bringing together researchers, academics, and students from around the world. The founding consortium includes seven universities from seven countries, working together to analyze democratic discourse across diverse cultural and political contexts.

The DDI aims to provide a robust, replicable framework for measuring democratic discourse quality that can be applied across different languages, cultures, and political systems. By training student coders in this methodology and using their adjudicated judgements to train ReHuman, we are building both a global community of researchers and an AI capable of tracking democratic health at scale.