Case Study: Varieties of Democracy achieves a modern, cloud-based, multilingual, responsive platform for 20 million democracy data points with Imaginary Landscape

Varieties of Democracy - Customer Case Study

Varieties of Democracy is one of the world’s largest democracy data initiatives, compiling 20 million data points across 168 countries and more than a century of information across 400 indicators. Facing a complex legacy setup—large databases, intricate interfaces, remote connections and systems administration—the project engaged Imaginary Landscape to redesign its server architecture to a modern cloud-based system and consolidate site functionality within the Django web framework.

Imaginary Landscape rebuilt the platform on the cloud, migrated and unified the site in Django, and delivered a new front end for selecting and graphing complex data, plus multilingual question and survey managers, a CMS, news center, and a multilingual search engine. As a result, the Varieties of Democracy site now provides improved usability and mobile access, serves its 20 million data points and 400 indicators across 168 countries, and is available in English, Spanish, French, Polish and Arabic.

Varieties of Democracy

Michael Coppedge

Varieties of Democracy