Democracy, Voice, and Accountability Index from the World Governance Indicators, legacy series

wgi_legacy preserves the pre-0.7.0 democracyData version of the World Governance Indicators "Voice and Accountability" index. It uses the pre-2025 WGI methodology, covers 1996 to 2023, and is not directly comparable to the revised wgi series introduced in 0.7.0.

Usage

wgi_legacy

Format

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 5350 rows and 13 columns.

Source

D. Kaufmann and A. Kraay. Worldwide Governance Indicators. The World Bank Research Group, 2020. http://www.govindicators.org.

Details

The variable schema is identical to wgi; the descriptions below are unchanged from the earlier packaged release.

Variables

wb_country: Country name (World Bank standard).
wb_code: World bank 3 character country code.
year: Year.
Estimate: Estimate of governance (ranges from approximately -2.5 (weak) to 2.5 (strong) governance performance), with a mean of 0.
StdErr: Standard error reflects variability around the point estimate of governance.
NumSrc: Number of data sources on which estimate is based. The methodology document lists, among these, the EIU Democracy Index, Freedom House, the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, the Gallup World Poll, the Institutional Profiles Database, the Political Risk Services International Country Risk Guide, and Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. See https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/sites/govindicators/doc/va.pdf for more details.
Rank: Percentile rank among all countries (ranges from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest) rank).
Lower: Lower bound of 90% confidence interval for governance, in percentile rank terms.
Upper: Upper bound of 90% confidence interval for governance, in percentile rank terms.

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.