The Bernhard, Nordstrom & Reenock Event History Coding of Democratic Breakdowns

The Bernhard, Nordstrom & Reenock Event History Coding of Democratic Breakdowns. From M. Bernhard, T. Nordstrom, and C. Reenock. "Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival". In: Journal of Politics 63.3 (2001), pp. 775-803. DOI: 10.1111/0022-3816.00087. Original data page archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20160210002155/http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bernhard/content/data/data.htm. The original dataset itself was never archived by the Wayback machine, and no longer exists on the web except here.

Usage

bnr

bnr_extended

Format

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 3651 rows and 8 columns.

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 10320 rows and 9 columns.

Source

M. Bernhard, T. Nordstrom, and C. Reenock. "Economic Performance, Institutional Intermediation, and Democratic Survival". In: Journal of Politics 63.3 (2001), pp. 775-803. DOI: 10.1111/0022-3816.00087. Original data page archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20160210002155/http://users.clas.ufl.edu/bernhard/content/data/data.htm.

Description

Taken from the BNR dataset description on the website:

(Time Series: 1913-2005, n: 3654, N: 126, Mean number of countries per year: 39.28 , Mean number of years per country: 29.46).

The event variable is a binary coding of all democracies from 1913 until 2005 prepared for use in event history analysis. Countries that meet the minimum conditions for democracy (see below) enter the dataset and are coded "0." When countries cease to meet those minimum criteria they are coded "1" and exit from the dataset. The time frame onset in 1913 is a function of when the first country (Norway) meets the minimum conditions. All series terminate in either in a breakdown in various years or right censorship in 2005.

The minimal conditions are based on Dahl's notion of polyarchy (competitiveness, inclusiveness) combined with Linz and Stepan's stateness criteria.

Competitiveness: We include countries that have competitive elections without gross distortions of fairness. We excluded cases from our set of democracies in which we detected outcome changing vote fraud, in which there was either extensive or extreme violence that inhibited voters from expressing themselves, or in which political parties representing a substantial portion of the population were banned.

Inclusiveness: We only include competitive polities in which at least fifty percent of all adult citizens are enfranchised to vote in our set of democracies.

Stateness: We also paid careful attention to questions of sovereignty, not including in our set of democracies many cases, where despite competitive elections, full sovereignty was not formally achieved. We also excluded in which internal wars in which twenty percent of the population or territory was out of control of the state were in progress.

bnr_country: The original country name in the dataset.
bnr_cowcode: The original COW country code in the dataset.
year: Calendar year
event: The event coding. 0 = democracy, 1 = termination.
bnr: Only in the bnr_extended dataset. 0 = non-democracy, 1 = democracy. Years with a termination event are coded 0. Note that this is the reverse of the event variable, where 0 indicates democracy; this is because the bnr dataset was originally created for survival analysis.

Standard descriptive variables (generated by this package)

extended_country_name: The name of the country in the Gleditsch-Ward system of states, or the official name of the entity (for non-sovereign entities and states not in the Gleditsch and Ward system of states) or else a common name for disputed cases that do not have an official name (e.g., Western Sahara, Hyderabad). The Gleditsch and Ward scheme sometimes indicates the common name of the country and (in parentheses) the name of an earlier incarnation of the state: thus, they have Germany (Prussia), Russia (Soviet Union), Madagascar (Malagasy), etc. For details, see Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "Interstate System Membership: A Revised List of the Independent States since 1816." International Interactions 25: 393-413. The list can be found at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/statelist.html.
GWn: Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code, from the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states.
cown: The Correlates of War numeric country code, 2016 version. This differs from Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code in a few cases. See http://www.correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/state-system-membership for the full list.
in_GW_system: Whether the state is "in system" (that is, is independent and sovereign), according to Gleditsch and Ward, for this particular date. Matches at the end of the year; so, for example South Vietnam 1975 is FALSE because, according to Gleditsch and Ward, the country ended on April 1975 (being absorbed by North Vietnam). It is also TRUE for dates beyond 2012 for countries that did not end by then, depsite the fact that the Gleditsch and Ward list has not been updated since.

Note about the "extended" version of the dataset

The bnr_extended version of this data is the same as the bnr data, but it uses the COW system of states to impute a value of "non-democracy" to years where the state was in the state system but does not appear in the original bnr dataset. For example, Albania first appears in the bnr dataset in 1992 as a democracy; but it was in the state system since much earlier. Since the bnr dataset claims to record all democratization events in the COW system of states since 1913, we assume Albania was non-democratic between 1913 and 1992. This procedure generates a large number of additional country-years with information about democracy.