NED University Launches First Internship on Democracy Discourse Index
Karachi, Pakistan | 30 June 2026
The Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy (GCRD) and NED University of Engineering and Technology in Pakistan today launched a first-of-its-kind joint summer internship, training university students in the methodology of the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI), a groundbreaking framework for measuring democratic health through the quality of public conversation.
With 27 students enrolled this summer, the internship marks a significant expansion of the DDI's reach in Pakistan and deepens a research partnership that has already produced a landmark Observatory pilot study on Pakistani public discourse.
What Is the DDI?
The Democracy Discourse Index is a longitudinal, human-trained, AI-coded discourse quality monitor developed by GCRD in partnership with Sensika Technologies and a founding research consortium of seven universities across seven countries. It is the world's first real-time framework for understanding how democracy is lived in public conversation.
Unlike conventional democracy indices that focus on institutions, elections, and legal frameworks, the DDI measures the structural properties of democratic conversation itself. It tracks 20 indicators across four core dimensions:
Empathy measures the extent to which people express understanding, solidarity, and consideration for others. Civility captures the presence of respectful, constructive, non-abusive communication. Trust Language examines how language builds or erodes trust in people, institutions, and democratic processes. Democratic Agency assesses the extent to which citizens express voice, participation, responsibility, and collective efficacy.
"Democracy is shaped not only by institutions, elections, and laws, but by the everyday quality of public conversation," said Dr. Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob, Founding Executive Director of GCRD. "The DDI helps reveal how citizens actually encounter one another in civic life and what that tells us about democratic health. This course puts that methodology directly in the hands of a new generation of student researchers."
Human Insight, AI-Assisted Scale
At the heart of the DDI is a distinctive methodology that combines the rigour of human coding with the reach of artificial intelligence. Faculty-led student research teams code public discourse using the DDI framework and inter-coder reliability protocols. That human-coded data is then used to train and validate AI classifiers, producing scalable democratic intelligence that is comparable across national contexts.
"Human coding provides the foundation. AI delivers scale," said Dr. Jacob.
Posts are classified by topic, including elections and governance, public institutions and accountability, economy and cost of living, climate and environment, migration and identity, gender and social justice, AI and media and information integrity, religion and values, and international affairs. This granularity allows policymakers and researchers to see not just national averages, but exactly where public discourse is healthy and where it is under strain.
Building on the Pakistan Observatory Pilot
Today’s course launch builds directly on the DDI Pakistan Observatory pilot, a research collaboration with Prof. Dr. Wajiha Raza Rizvi at NED University that analysed public discourse across five distinct diplomatic phases. The pilot demonstrated the DDI’s capacity to track shifts in discourse quality in real time, connecting patterns of public conversation to political and diplomatic events.
The summer course takes that research foundation a step further, but with a significant methodological expansion. Where the Observatory pilot coded posts from Platform X, this semester’s students will analyse user comments from online media websites and the social media platforms of news organisations, capturing the spaces where journalism and public reaction directly intersect. Dr. Jacob sees this as a critical lens on democratic health. “When citizens respond to a news story in the comments section of a media website or on their social media page, they are doing something profoundly democratic. They are talking back to power, negotiating meaning, and signalling whether they feel heard,” he said. “What we find there will tell us not just about the quality of conversation, but about the health of the relationship between media and the citizens it is supposed to serve.” Students will contribute their coded data directly to the growing body of internationally comparable democratic intelligence produced by the GCRD network.
“When citizens respond to a news story in the comments section of a media website or on their social media page, they are doing something profoundly democratic. They are talking back to power, negotiating meaning, and signalling whether they feel heard.”
The pilot's findings are captured in a GCRD policy brief published in May 2026, Mediation and its Discontents: Pakistan's Role in the US-Iran Peace Process and the Quality of Democratic Discourse, co-authored by Prof. Dr. Rizvi and Dr. Jacob. The brief analysed some 3,000 public posts coded by 36 student-researchers at NED University across five diplomatic phases, from Pakistan-Afghanistan cross-border strikes in March through to the collapse of the 21-hour Islamabad summit in May. The DDI composite rose 6.5 points between the conflict entry phase and the peak of the Islamabad Talks, with Civility reaching 66.9% and Trust Language 67.9% as Pakistan assumed its mediator role. Yet the data also revealed a persistent structural gap: Democratic Agency remained the weakest and least responsive dimension throughout, averaging 52.8% against a Civility average of 64.0%. As the brief concludes, Pakistan's public sphere can become more civil without becoming more democratic in the participatory sense. The brief is catalogued in the UN DESA Doha Solutions Platform and mapped to SDG 16 on Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.
A Growing Global Consortium
NED University is part of the founding research consortium that includes Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, New Bulgarian University, Fan S. Noli University of Korce in Albania, Tulane University in the United States, the University of St. Kliment Ohridski Bitola in North Macedonia, and the Federal University of Technology Minna in Nigeria.
The DDI network is continuing to expand, with outreach underway to additional universities and countries. The Democracy Discourse Index is accessible at gcrd.org.uk/ddi. A public dashboard is available at discourseobservatory.org. For research partnership and university consortium enquiries, contact info@gcrd.org.uk.
The Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy is a UK-based think-act-teach organisation working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, democratic renewal, and civic engagement.
