add_democracy {peacesciencer}

Add democracy information to a data frame

Description

add_democracy() allows you to add estimates of democracy to your data.

Usage

add_democracy(data)

Arguments

data

a data frame with appropriate peacesciencer attributes

Details

Be mindful that the data are fundamentally state-year and that extensions to leader-level data should be understood as approximations for leaders in a given state-year.

A vignette on the package's website talks about how these data are here primarily to encourage you to maximize the number of observations in the analysis to follow. Xavier Marquez' QuickUDS estimates have the best coverage. If democracy is ultimately a control variable, or otherwise a variable not of huge concern for the analysis (i.e. the user has no particular stake on the best measurement of democracy or the best conceptualization and operationalization of "democracy"), please use Marquez' estimates instead of Polity or V-dem. If the user is doing an analysis of inter-state conflict, and across the standard post-1816 domain in conflict studies, definitely don't use the Polity data because the extent of its missingness is both large and unnecessary. Please read the vignette describing these issues here: http://svmiller.com/peacesciencer/articles/democracy.html

Value

add_democracy() takes a (dyad-year, leader-year, leader-dyad-year, state-year) data frame and adds information about the level of democracy for the state or two states in the dyad in a given year. If the data are dyad-year or leader-dyad-year, the function adds six total columns for the first state (i.e. ccode1 or gwcode1) and the second state (i.e. ccode2 or gwcode2) about the level of democracy measured by the Varieties of Democracy project (v2x_polyarchy), the Polity project (polity2), and Xavier Marquez' QuickUDS extensions/estimates. If the data are state-year or leader-year, the function returns three additional columns to the original data that contain that same information for a given state in a given year.

Author(s)

Steven V. Miller

References

Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Luhrmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Agnes Cornell, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerlow, Valeriya Mechkova, Johannes von Romer, Aksel Sundtrom, Eitan Tzelgov, Luca Uberti, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2020. "V-Dem Codebook v10" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.

Marshall, Monty G., Ted Robert Gurr, and Keith Jaggers. 2017. "Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2017." Center for Systemic Peace.

Marquez, Xavier, "A Quick Method for Extending the Unified Democracy Scores" (March 23, 2016). doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2753830

Pemstein, Daniel, Stephen Meserve, and James Melton. 2010. "Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type." Political Analysis 18(4): 426-449.

Examples

# just call `library(tidyverse)` at the top of the your script
library(magrittr)

cow_ddy %>% add_democracy()

create_stateyears(system="gw") %>% add_democracy()
create_stateyears(system="cow") %>% add_democracy()