Methodology

The Social Policy Signalling Index is a descriptive, 1-100 composite score that reflects theintensity of institutional signalling around contemporary social issues within a country.

Higher values indicate more signalling activity (policies, rules, communications, or enforcement), not "better" or "worse." This is a descriptive metric, not a normative judgment.

Normalization

Each country receives seven dimension scores (0-100). We normalize each dimension using robustmin-max scaling with winsorization at the 1st and 99th percentiles to reduce the impact of extreme outliers.

rawD[c,t] → winsorize at p1/p99 across all countries
minD[t], maxD[t] from winsorized set
scoreD[c,t] = 100 × (rawD[c,t] - minD[t]) / (maxD[t] - minD[t] + ε)

Event Impact

Events detected from news sources and official publications are classified by dimension and assigned an impact score (-3 to +3). These impacts flow into a 7-day Exponential Moving Average (EMA)to smooth volatility.

impact_i ∈ {-3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3}
ΔD_i = α × impact_i    (default α = 0.5)
emaD[c,t] = λ × (scoreD[c,t-1] + ΣΔD_i) + (1-λ) × emaD[c,t-1]
  where λ = 2/(k+1), k = 7 days

Final Composite Score

The final index is the weighted sum of all dimension scores, clamped to [1, 100]:

SPSI[c,t] = clamp( Σ w_D × emaD[c,t] / 100, 1, 100 )

We ingest public sources including:

• Government notices, legislation trackers, ministry bulletins (daily to weekly)
• Mainstream news outlets' RSS feeds (hourly polling, cached)
• Platform policy pages and transparency reports (monthly or on change)
• Corporate press releases from top market-cap firms (weekly crawl)
• NGO datasets on press freedom and education policy (monthly/quarterly refresh)

A lightweight classifier tags each item with one or more dimensions and estimates a signed impact. We recompute all country scores nightly at 03:00 UTC and publish the full ranking, movers, and an events log with citations.

Every country page lists the day's impactful events and the sources used. This methodology page includes weights, formulas, and a change log (when updates are made).

All source code for this project is available for review. We maintain a public change log of any modifications to weights, dimensions, or scoring algorithms.

The Social Policy Signalling Index is a directional aggregation of publicly observable signals. It does not assess:

• Outcomes or causal effects of policies
• Individual beliefs or attitudes
• Quality or effectiveness of policies
• Moral or ethical judgments

This index should be interpreted alongside the cited sources. Data quality depends on the availability and reliability of public sources, which varies by country.