Data Packages Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem): Dedicated package Polyarchy: Semicolon delimited CSV file -> rio Freedom House: Excel file with by-year sheets Polity IV: SPSS file -> rio Democracy Barometer: Excel file with header in top rows -> rio The Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID): Plain CSV file -> rio World Bank’s World Development Indicators: Dedicated package Merging all datasets Writing to file Shortly after writing this post on importing datasets in different formats (CSV, XLS, XLSX, SAV) to R, I got the following comment:
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.
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.
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.
Data Differences within country-years Differences by groups Gender Age Urban/rural residence Education Sampling scheme The growth in cross-national survey projects in the last decades leads to situations when two or more surveys are carried out in the same country and the same year but in different projects, and contain overlapping sets of survey questions. Assuming that the surveys are based on representative samples - a claim that major cross-national survey projects typically make - it could be expected that estimates from surveys carried out in the same country and year are reasonably close.
