Measuring online political activity: introducing the digital society project dataset

Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using the Varieties of Democracy Project infrastructure, DSP provides annual global data from 2000 to 2021. The dataset features 35 indicators measuring online censorship, politicization of social media, coordinated information operations, foreign influence, monitoring of domestic politics, and regime cyber capacity. This article introduces the DSP data collection effort, overviews the resulting dataset, and validates key indicators by conducting a series of diagnostic tests. We demonstrate that the DSP dataset aligns with extant datasets measuring internet freedom and offers expanded coverage across countries and over time. We analyze two case studies, walking through how the DSP data can be used to extend existing work on China to generalize this case to other contexts, and examining in depth the case of Ethiopia, which differs the most between DSP and Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net.