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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

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)