The Political Regime Change (PRC) dataset.

Source: R/data_documentation.R

The Political Regime Change dataset. First described in M. Gasiorowski. "An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset". In: Comparative Political Studies 29.4 (1996), pp. 469-483. DOI: 10.1177/0010414096029004004. Available in updated form in G. Reich. "Categorizing Political Regimes: New Data for Old Problems". In: Democratization 9.4 (2002), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.1080/714000289. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/714000289.

prc_gasiorowski

prc_pmm

Format

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 11384 rows and 12 columns.

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 6002 rows and 7 columns.

Source

M. Gasiorowski. "An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset". In: Comparative Political Studies 29.4 (1996), pp. 469-483. DOI: 10.1177/0010414096029004004.

G. Reich. "Categorizing Political Regimes: New Data for Old Problems". In: Democratization 9.4 (2002), pp. 1-24. DOI: 10.1080/714000289. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/714000289.

Details

prc_gasiorowski_country

The original country name in the dataset.

year

Calendar year. In the prc_gasiorowski dataset, more than one regime may be coded for a country-year. For example, Bulgaria in 1990 is coded as an authoritarian regime (to mid 1990), then a transitional regime, and then as a democracy, so there are three different values for Bulgaria 1990. In the prc_pmm, only the last regime (democracy, in the Bulgaria case for 1990) is coded for the year, so there is only one value for each country-year.

.
regime

The regime type for the year. Can be A (authoritarian), T (transition), S (semidemocratic), and D (democratic).

start

The start year of the regime.

end

The end year of the regime.

prc

Numeric version of regime. 1 = authoritarian, 2 = transition, 3 = semidemocratic, 4 = democratic.

prc_at_end_year

Value of prc at the end of the year. (May differ from value at the beginning of the year when a transition occurs). Only in the pmm_gasiorowski dataset.

prc_at_beginning_year

Value of prc at the beginning of the year. (May differ from value at the end of the year when a transition occurs). Only in the pmm_gasiorowski dataset.

prc_notrans

Same as prc but with transition values set to NA. Only in prc dataset.

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

The prc_pmm version of this data is taken from D. Pemstein, S. A. Meserve, and J. Melton. Replication data for: Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type. 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/PMM. The original dataset is found in prc_gasiorowski. The prc_pmm data only goes back to 1945. It also differs from the original data in 245 country-years, because it only includes one year per country - whereas prc_gasiorowski can include more than one regime classification for a given year. It is included here for completeness (and to enable one to replicate the uds index).