Changelog • democracyData

democracyData 0.6.0

Converted pkgdown articles to Quarto for consistent rendering; site now builds with Bootstrap 5.
Updated Freedom House downloads to latest year (2024).
Updated EIU to latest year (2024)
Updated VDem simple data to latest year (2024, version 15.0)
Added new VaPoReg data on political regimes by Kailitz (2025) and ensured redownload_vaporeg works properly.
Incorporated corrected Arat data from Zehra Arat’s original book.
Added newest version of LIED (6.8).
Fixed problem with FH Electoral Democracies list download that was wrongly coding later democracies and missing one year.
Update to {targets} pipeline to ensure consistent updating of data.
Other updates to documentation and tests.
Minor updates to ensure verbose=FALSE really results in quiet downloads (no messages/warnings).
Now uses testthat 3rd edition. Updated tests to use snapshots.

Removed dependence on plyr
Updated Freedom House download functions to use the latest data (2023 Freedom in the World Report)
Updated EIU to 2023 release (2023 EIU report).
Updated simplified Vdem (vdem_simple) data to latest version (13.0).
Deprecated redownload_pipe() (data no longer available for download)
Deprecated redownload_blm() (data no longer available for download)
Deprecated redownload_bnr() (data no longer available for download)
Added licensing info where available
Updated documentation for consistency and fixed various problems with citations.
Updated anckar data to V2 (with values to 2019).
Fixed Türkiye bug in country_year_coder()
Moved to a new build system using targets to ensure consistency

Updated BMR to version 4.0.
Updated BTI to 2022 release.
Updated EIU to 2022 release (2022 EIU report).
Updated LIED dataset to version 6.4.
Updated Freedom House download functions to use the latest data (2022 Freedom in the World Report).
Updated Vanhanen dataset to version 8.0
Added simplified basic version of V-Dem dataset (with just the 7 main democracy indexes) to the package.
Archived REIGN dataset (since it is no longer being maintained)
Re-wrote README for clarity
Minor big fixes and documentation updates

Added two new datasets, Bjørnskov and Rode (2021), which updates PACL/DD to 2020, and ANRR (Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, and Robinson 2019), used in their article “Democracy does Cause Growth”.
Migrated some of the functions from QuickUDS to this package to facilitate the construction of latent variable indexes of democracy
Created three new articles: one on understanding the temporal and spatial coverage of the datasets included in the passage; one on understanding the correlations between different democracy measures; and one on creating latent variable indexes of democracy from the data in this package (including extending the Unified Democracy Scores)
Lots of minor improvements to the documentation and the website, including a better organized index of functions and articles.

Updated the Freedom House data (2021 with data up to 2020), updating download_fh and download_fh_full, and updated the documentation of these functions and the citation info for the FH data. (The List of Electoral Democracies downloaded via download_fh_electoral does not appear to have been updated by Freedom House yet).
Updated download_wgi_voice_and_accountability to download data up to the latest year (2019), and fixed the documentation of the function.
Updated the REIGN dataset documentation.
Updated eiu, the EIU democracy index (2021 edition, data up to 2020), and updated its citation info.
Minor code improvements.
Fixed README references.
Added tests of redownload_* family of functions.
Added Github Actions badge.
Minor changes to generate_democracy_scores_dataset to avoid deprecated dplyr::rename_at.

Added the Bertelsmann transformation Index of democracy (bti) and made improvements to generate_democracy_scores_dataset.
Minor fixes to documentation.

Fixed diagnostic printing issue when moving to dplyr 1.0.0.
Updated download_fh and download_fh_electoral to download the latest version (2020, with data up to 2019) of Freedom House.
Added a new function, download_fh_full to download the full Freedom House data (2012-2019) with all subcategory scores.
Archived the PolityIV dataset (annual version), since Polity is now moving to version 5 and revising all its scores.
Changed download_polity_annual to download version 5 of Polity (Polity5).
Fixed download_wgi_voice_and_accountability - now downloads correctly update to 2018.
eiu now updated to the latest release (2020, with data to 2019).
LIED now updated to the latest release (2020, version 5.2, with data to 2019).
Fixed redownload_magaloni download link, which had changed.
pitf now has two versions: pitf_p4 based on Polity IV data, and pitf, calculated from Polity5. Both now include data to 2018.
Eliminated redownload_uds function since the UDS website is no longer online.
Updated bibliography and documentation for many datasets.

Updated download_fh and download_fh_electoral to download the latest version (2019, with data up to 2018) of Freedom House.
Updated download_polity_annual to download the 2018 update of Polity IV.
Updated download_reign to download the latest data from REIGN.
eiu now updated to the latest release (2019, with data to 2018).
Updated download_wgi_voice_and_accountability to use the latest version of the data.

Now includes Anckar and Fredriksson’s (2018) dataset of authoritarian regimes (anckar) and the Support Vector Machine index of democracy (two versions, Grundler and Krieger 2018 and 2016)
Fixed bugs in the download_reign function due to a change of schema in their google sheet.

Now includes the Economist Intelligence Index’s democracy index (eiu).
Updated the bmr dataset to the latest version (3.0), which includes a new variable, democracy_femalesuffrage.
Fixed bugs with the download_reign function not picking up the right google spreadsheet.
Fixed bugs in country_year_coder not picking up on “Sudan, South” as a country.

Added a NEWS.md file to track changes to the package.
donwload_fh now downloads the latest versions of the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” dataset (updated to 2017, report date January 2018)
download_wgi_voice_and_accountability now downloads the latest version of the World Bank’s voice and accountability index (updated to 2016)