Judiciary Health Index
A weighted and PCA-based index measuring judicial health across African countries, built for a Liberal Democracy course using the V-Dem dataset.
View project →Built as part of a Liberal Democracy course at IITM Zanzibar, this project asked a simple question: how do you measure how healthy a judicial system actually is?
I constructed two indices using the V-Dem dataset. The first assigned normalized weights to indicators based on their significance to judicial function. The second used PCA to let the data surface which factors matter most without pre-imposing assumptions. Both were applied to African countries using 2023 data, and then used to trace trends over time for India, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Japan, and Germany from 2001 to 2023.
The link goes to an interactive visual map showing the index across African countries.