AuthoritarianismBook

Hello!

This package contains all the code and data necessary to replicate the figures in my book Non-democratic Politics: Authoritarianism, Dictatorships, and Democratization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). It also documents the various data sources used and provides code to create additional figures and tables. It is meant for students and people with little experience of statistics or programming. (Other supplementary material for the book will be available at this Palgrave website).

To make the most of this package, it is recommended that you install RStudio, an R development environment. It’s free, open source, and easy to use.

You should also install the package devtools, which you can use to download and install this package directly from GitHub:

if(!require(devtools)) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}

devtools::install_github('xmarquez/AuthoritarianismBook')

The package code is in the form of vignettes, tutorials that mix plain English, R code, and graphics to guide you through the making of the book’s figures and point you to ways of exploring the underlying data in other ways. You can list available vignettes by typing browseVignettes("AuthoritarianismBook") after installing the package, or clicking on the vignettes link in this website.

Though the pre-built vignettes are all available here, you will need to rebuild them on your machine if you want to view them locally, which (for some of them) will take some time. (A couple of the vignettes contain code that takes a long time to run, and require additional packages that may need to be downloaded and installed. The vignette on creating an index of personal power is always available at this site but is never downloaded and installed with the rest of the package for performance reasons). If you want to force most of the vignettes to be built when you first download the package, use (WARNING! This may take a while!):

devtools::install_github('xmarquez/AuthoritarianismBook', 
                         build_vignettes = TRUE, 
                         dependencies = c("Imports", 
                                          "Suggests"))

The vast majority of the code in these vignettes makes use of just two packages by Hadley Wickham, dplyr and ggplot2. You can install them as follows:

install.packages("dplyr")
install.packages("ggplot2")

The code in this package’s vignettes will thus be much easier to understand if you know the basics of these other packages. Check out the dplyr and ggplot2 cheatsheets for a quick start, and their vignettes and documentation for a more in-depth look.

All other required packages are listed at the beginning of each vignette. You can install all of them at once as follows:

install.packages(c("knitr", "rmarkdown", "plyr", "dplyr", "reshape2", "ggplot2",
                "GGally", "ggrepel", "scales", "survival", "lubridate",
                "forcats", "mirt", "cshapes", "stringr", "broom",
                "purrr", "tidyr",  "plotly","maptools", "rgeos"))

All the data used to construct all figures and perform all analyses is fully documented; click on the datasets link on this website for more information about each of the datasets used.

Explore this data, and let me know if you have questions!