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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

democracyData (development version)

Bug fixes

  • LIED Gleditsch-Ward codes (#20). Fixed a bug in redownload_lied() that overwrote the GWn column with Correlates of War codes for the entire dataset. Wherever the two state systems assign different codes (unified Germany, Serbia, unified Yemen, and the Pacific microstates Kiribati, Nauru, Tonga, and Tuvalu), LIED’s rows carried identifier tuples that matched no other dataset, so extended_uds fitted phantom duplicate country-years whose only measure was lexical_index. The rebuilt LIED corrects 710 GWn values (no other columns change), and the refitted extended_uds drops 732 phantom rows; scores for unaffected country-years are essentially unchanged (r > 0.999). extended_uds is now unique by GWn and year among in-system country-years, and a regression test enforces this. Thanks to Steve Miller (@svmiller) for the report.

Infrastructure

  • Dataset integrity tests. New offline tests validate every packaged dataset against the democracy_info registry (coverage in both directions, standard identifier columns, no missing extended_country_name, plausible year ranges, and presence of the declared measure columns), and compare every dataset’s structure (class, dimensions, column names and types, year range) against a recorded manifest, catching accidental data corruption without network access. Regenerate the manifest with data-raw/capture_dataset_manifest.R after legitimate data updates.

  • Registry fixes. Added the missing democracy_info row for arat and corrected the stale measure columns and downloadable flag for vaporeg.

  • Lighter dependencies. mirt, knitr, and here moved from Imports to Suggests; the UDS modeling functions prompt for mirt when needed, and diagnostic tables fall back to plain printing without knitr.

democracyData 0.7.1

Dataset updates

  • Freedom House 2026. Updated fh to the Freedom in the World 2026 country-and-territory ratings workbook, extending coverage through 2025.

  • Freedom House full scores. Updated fh_full to combine the detailed 2013-2026 workbook with the aggregate 2003-2026 workbook, extending coverage through 2025 while preserving the existing schema by filling unavailable item-level questions with missing values.

  • Freedom House electoral democracies. Updated fh_electoral through 2025 and clarified the two routes in the data: electoral now follows the direct official Freedom House lists where available, while electoral_calc remains the recalculated series from the full scores.

  • Freedom House download functions. The packaged fh, fh_full, and fh_electoral objects now track the newer 2026 Freedom House workbooks, but download_fh(), download_fh_full(), and download_fh_electoral() remain soft-deprecated archived downloaders for the last public 2025 release.

democracyData 0.7.0

Dataset updates

  • V-Dem v16. Moved vdem_simple and the vdemdata Suggests version to 16.0 (V-Dem v16, released 2026-03-17).

  • BTI 2026. Updated bti to the Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2026 edition (data through 2024).

  • Bjørnskov-Rode v6.2. Updated pacl_update to the September 2025 release (v6.2).

  • WGI 2.0 methodology break. The World Bank released a full methodological revision of the Worldwide Governance Indicators in 2025: the source pool was expanded (to 35 sources, including the Arab, Asian, and Euro barometers), the aggregation model changed, and estimates were recomputed back to 1996. download_wgi_voice_and_accountability() now reads the new wgidataset_with_sourcedata-2025.xlsx file (covering 1996-2024). Scores produced by this function are not comparable to those returned by democracyData 0.6.0 or earlier. See the methodology PDF linked from the documentation URL.

  • Added wgi_legacy, an archived snapshot of the pre-0.7.0 WGI series (1996-2023) with the same variable schema as the revised wgi object.

  • Freedom House. Freedom House moved their machine-readable FIW data to email-request distribution in 2026. fh, fh_full, and fh_electoral therefore remain frozen at the 2025 release.

  • Freedom House download functions. download_fh(), download_fh_full(), and download_fh_electoral() now explicitly target the archived 2025 release and are soft-deprecated to reflect that Freedom House no longer provides the latest machine-readable data as a public direct download.

  • Anckar v3.0. Updated anckar to version 3.0 using the May 16, 2025 Harvard Dataverse release (doi:10.7910/DVN/AK8NVX). It now covers 1800-2024.

  • LIED 6.9. Updated LIED to version 6.9 using the April 1, 2026 Harvard Dataverse file. It now covers up to 2025.

  • EIU Democracy Index 2025. Updated eiu to cover 2006-2025 (167 countries × 18 year panels: 2006, 2008, 2010-2025). The 2025 EIU report is the first edition that no longer publishes a country-by-country appendix of scores — EIU moved per-country data behind paid Country Analysis / Snowflake services — so eiu is now built from the Wikipedia aggregation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index, which we validated against our prior snapshot (99.8% agreement for 2006-2024). As a side effect, the Niger / Nigeria swap for 2015 present in the previously shipped snapshot is now corrected.

  • VaPoReg (Kailitz). This is now an explicit breaking change. The current vaporeg object contains the March 2026 VaPoReg release in its current upstream schema (data through 2025), and redownload_vaporeg() returns that upstream country-year table directly rather than translating it back into legacy democracyData variable names. The old packaged interface is preserved separately as vaporeg_2024, with different variable names. Internally, generate_democracy_scores_dataset() now derives its VaPoReg democracy measures from the new release using VaPoReg’s own simplified classifications (vaporeg_regtype_bindem and vaporeg_regtype_triple) plus a package-specific strict democracy indicator.

  • PIPE constructed variables. Recalculated the package-derived PIPE variables (cum_salterel, cum_term, democracy, democracy2, democracy_age, regime, and regime_period) to better match the PIPE codebook. In particular, only salterel == 1 and term == 1 now advance democratic spells, and regime/regime_period are now missing before independence.

  • Extended UDS refresh. Rebuilt extended_uds from the current datasets, replacing the old Kailitz-based path with the current VaPoReg and revised WGI inputs alongside the other refreshed component datasets.

country_year_coder() rework

  • Fixed a duplicated “between-periods” bug. The same date-range gap check appeared at two sites (is_between() and the inline test_condition() tiebreaker). Both now delegate to a single helper (date_year_in_gap()), so fixes and future changes stay in one place.

  • Added two-sided normalization of country names. Input country names are now normalized before the fuzzy join (diacritics mapped to ASCII via stringi::stri_trans_general, punctuation collapsed to whitespace, case folded). The dictionary regexes are normalized symmetrically at match time so that “Türkiye”, “Turkiye”, and “TURKEY” now all match, as do “Côte d’Ivoire” / “Cote d’Ivoire” / “Ivory Coast”, “Congo, Dem. Rep.” / “Democratic Republic of the Congo” / “DR Congo”, “U.S.A.” / “USA”, etc.

  • Exported normalize_country() as a helper for callers that want to pre-normalize country names themselves.

  • Added stringi to Imports.

  • Raised the minimum supported R version to 4.2.0.

  • A small number of successor-state country-year rows that previously fell into the “between-periods” gap may now resolve differently as a side effect of the bug fix. Behavior on the “golden” regression fixture is unchanged.

Other

  • Moved to github actions for pkgdown site instead of tracking the /docs folder.

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.

democracyData 0.5.1

  • Fixed broken WGI URL, now data available to 2022

democracyData 0.5.0

  • 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

democracyData 0.4.0

  • 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

democracyData 0.3.0

  • 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.

democracyData 0.2.6

  • 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.

democracyData 0.2.5

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

  • Minor fixes to documentation.

democracyData 0.2.4

  • 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.

democracyData 0.2.3

  • Fixed download link for the SVMDI dataset, minor typo fixes.

democracyData 0.2.2

  • 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.

democracyData 0.2.2

  • 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.

democracyData 0.2.1

  • 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.

democracyData 0.2.0

  • 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)