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We began collecting data in the summer of 2021, and we have so far coded 67 discrete communities, over 300 institutions, and about 100 institutional mechanisms. We began looking into existing databases of documented groups around the world, such as the Ethnographic Atlas and the Human Relations Area Files, and proceeded to identify communities that fit our criteria.
While much of the more readily available data comes from the West, we have deliberately sought to cover less well-known, and often less well-documented, non-Western cases. The reasons, as we explain in a recent Daedalus article, are empirical and ethical: as globalization and advances in digitization enable us to learn more about the diversity of political arrangements around the world and throughout history, the usual Western-centered view seems increasingly myopic. Moreover, if the goal of this project is contributing to retrofit modern democracy with an eye to participation and inclusion, then we need to design for a “pluriverse,” a space in which many social worlds can fit.
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Last updated: May 2024
- Name: The name of the community with collective governance practices.
- Community: The group of people governed by the collective governance institution and the institutions connected to it within a political unit.
- Institution: A structure through which legislative or judicial decisions are made.
- Collective governance institution: Any structure where a group of more than one person gathers to make decisions on behalf of the community.
- Mechanism: A text description of a specific governance practice or rule. In this database, mechanisms are grouped into three broad categories: access, defining access to the instutition; decision-making, regulating decision-making processes; and enforcement, guiding enforcement practices.
- Geography: Location of the community by continent or subregion.
- Time span: Written text description of the centuries in which the community existed in history.
- Time span: start: Starting century encoded as integers, with negative numbers denoting BC, and positive numbers denoting AD.
- Time span: end: Ending century encoded as integers, with negative numbers denoting BC, and positive numbers denoting AD.
- Size: The number of members in the community. While some communities may have additionally granular size encodings, community size is generally bucketed in the following groups:
1 - 10;11 - 100;100 - 1,000;1,001 - 10,000;10,001 - 100,000;100,001 - 1,000,000;1,000,001 - 10,000,000;10,000,000+;Unknown - Source: Citation of material documenting community information.