The Varieties of Political Regimes (VaPoReg) dataset, legacy 2024 schema

vaporeg_2024 preserves the pre-0.7.0 democracyData interface for VaPoReg. It is the last packaged version of the old schema, covering 1900 to 2024 and including the package's standardized country identifiers and derived democracy measures. Use vaporeg for the current March 2026 edition.

Usage

vaporeg_2024

Format

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 29840 rows and 30 columns.

Source

S. Kailitz. Varieties of Political Regimes (va-PoReg). Codebook. Version 1.7. Tech. rep. Dresden: Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies, 2024. S. Kailitz. Varieties of Political Regimes (va-PoReg). Dataset. Dresden, 2024.

Variables

vaporeg_country: The name of the country or political unit for a given year.
year: The calendar year.
vaporeg_code: The VaPoReg unit identifier.
GeoNamesID: Legacy geographic identifier for linking with spatial datasets.
vaporeg_cowcode: The Correlates of War country code, where available.
vaporeg_cr: Legacy compatibility alias of vaporeg_s.
vaporeg_s: The standard classification of political regimes.
vaporeg_a: An alternative classification that merges democracies and semi-democracies and groups monarchies together as ruling monarchies.
vaporeg_governing_country: For colonial and occupation regimes, the ruling country.
vaporeg_s_gc, vaporeg_a_gc: Standard and alternative regime classifications for the governing country.
vaporeg_s_start, vaporeg_s_end, vaporeg_s_duration, vaporeg_s_change: Start date, end date, duration, and annual change indicator for the standard classification.
vaporeg_a_start, vaporeg_a_end, vaporeg_a_duration, vaporeg_a_change: Start date, end date, duration, and annual change indicator for the alternative classification.
Gapminder_pop, gm_world_pop: Population variables included in the legacy interface.
un_region, un_continent: UN region and continent codes.
extended_country_name, GWn, cown, in_GW_system: Standardized country identifiers added by democracyData.
vaporeg_binary_strict: A dichotomous democracy indicator coded 1 only for the most demanding VaPoReg democracy category.
vaporeg_binary_non_strict: A dichotomous democracy indicator coded 1 for both full and defective democracies.
vaporeg_trichotomous: A trichotomous democracy indicator coded 2 for full democracy, 1 for defective democracy, and 0 otherwise.

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 via the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20130627160240/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 https://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.