Data
Packages
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem): Dedicated package
Polyarchy: Semicolon delimited CSV file
Freedom House: Excel file with by-year sheets
Polity IV: SPSS file
Democracy Barometer: Excel file with header in top rows
The Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID): Plain CSV file
World Bank’s World Development Indicators: Dedicated package
Merging all datasets
Country graphs
Variable graphs
Writing to file
with Viktoriia Muliavka
Social and political scientists often need to put together datasets of country-level political, economic, and demographic variables with data from different sources.
How 2015 voters voted in 2007 and 2011
How 2007 voters voted in 2011 and 2015
About POLPAN
Where did the current governing party get their votes from? Did supporters of the previous ruling party switch preferences or did they abstain from voting altogether? Cross-sectional datasets, such as one-off election polls, do not typically provide data to answer these questions. Panel studies, such as the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN), do.
Determining meritocratic allocation
Calculating the distance to meritocracy
Distance to meritocracy by country
Meritocracy is a principle according to which rewards are based on merit, as well as an ideal situation resulting from the operation of this principle. In their 1985 Social Foces paper titled “How Far to Meritocracy? Empirical Tests of a Controversial Thesis”, Tadeusz Krauze and Kazimierz M. Słomczyński proposed an algorithm to construct a theoretical joint distribution of education and income, given their marginal distributions, that would satisfy the conditions of meritocratic allocation.
What comes first?
Wikipedia, Google, News
Interest in technology
Cross-correlations
News coverage versus Wikipedia page views
with Maria Khachatryan, Filip Kowalski, Jakub Siwiec, and Paweł Zawadzki
The Hackathon Next Generation Internet Data Sprint was organized by the Digital Economy Lab of the University of Warsaw on November 9 and 10, 2018. The goal of the hackathon was to explore datasets on Wikipedia page views and edits, Reddit posts, media mentions, and others, to generate insights about the use of the internet and new technologies.
BigSurv18 and the Green City Hackathon
Team number 5
Data
Bike use
Altitude of Bicing stations
Location of mechanical and electric bike stations
Empty stations by station altitude
Next steps
with Saleha Habibullah, Sakinat Folorunso, and Vera Paul
BigSurv18 and the Green City Hackathon
One of accompanying events of the BigSurv18: Big Data Meets Survey Science conference in Barcelona last week was the Green City Hackathon.
Political participation in Poland
Latent class analysis
Three types of participants: the Disengaged, Activists, and Protesters
Region maps
I recently came across Jennifer Oser’s 2017 article in Social Indicators Research about “political tool kits”, i.e. profiles (or patterns) of participation in different political activities. Her general argument is that research on citizen participation would benefit from analyses of such participation patterns instead of (or at least in addition to) just looking at determinants of participation in single activities.
Sample correlations
Sample correlations by gender
Sample correlations by age
Sample correlations by education
Contrast
Conclusion
One of the reasons for the harmonization of personal income in addition to household income was to check if the two correlate highly enough to use household income as a substitute for personal income in analyses where economic status is a control variable. This would be great, because household income variables are available in 1177 surveys out of 1721 analyzed in the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1, while personal income only in 453 surveys.
Data
Number of response options
Item non-response
Distributions
Harmonized target variables
Next steps
with Przemek Powałko
Individual economic status is a necessary element of almost all sociological analyses, including studies of political attitudes and behavior. To supplement the already harmonized variables in the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1 and for the purposes of my resesarch of the effects of education on political engagement, Przemek and I harmonized two additional variables: personal income and household income1.
Political participation in the ESS
Country levels of political participation
Inequality of political participation
Democracy indicators
Economic inequality
Matrix scatter plots
How to measure political inequality? The Variaties of Democracy project (V-Dem) has a set of political equality indicators that capture the extent to which political power is distributed according to wealth and income, membership in a particular social group, gender or sexual orientation (cf. V-Dem Codebook v.
Cross-national survey projects conduct surveys on representative samples of adult populations.
How do the distributions of respondents’ age vary across surveys carried out in the same country in different years and different projects?
Like in a couple of previous posts (here, here and here) I use data from the Survey Data Recycling dataset (SDR) version 1, which includes selected harmonized variables from 22 cross-national survey projects. SDR only includes surveys that claim to have samples representative for adult populations.