Democracy (Correlates of War System)
cw_democracy.RdThese are estimates of democracy for Correlates of War state system members.
Format
A data frame with the following 6 variables.
ccodea numeric vector for the Correlates of War state code
yeara numeric vector for the year
eudsa numeric vector for the extended Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) estimate in a given year
aeudsa numeric vector for the adjusted, extended UDS estimate in a given year
polity2a numeric vector for the
polity2score in a given yearv2x_polyarchya numeric vector for the Varieties of Democracy "polyarchy" estimate in a given year
Details
Extended Unified Democracy Scores (UDS) estimates come from Marquez' democracyData package. That is version 0.5.1. The Varieties of Democracy data are version 15, but also come by way of their R package.
The "adjusted" versions of the UDS estimate means that 0 represents the average
cut-point for the dichotomous indicators. If it were my call to make, I think
these "adjusted" estimates generally have greater face validity, certainly
for obvious autocracies, even if one might object that they're somewhat less
sanguine than they perhaps could or should be with obvious democracies. For
the latest years in the sample, run a pnorm() on the values returned for
illustrative cases like Afghanistan, Australia, China, North Korea, Sweden,
and the United States to get an idea of the differences between these
measures (as probabilistic assessments of whether the thing in question is a
democracy).
References
Please cite Miller (2022) for peacesciencer. Beyond that, cite the following, contingent on which democracy estimate you are using.
Extended Unified Democracy Scores (UDS)
Marquez, Xavier. 2016. "A Quick Method for Extending the Unified Democracy Scores" doi: 10.2139/ssrn.2753830
Marquez, Xavier. 2020. "democracyData: A package for accessing and manipulating existing measures of democracy." https://github.com/xmarquez/democracyData.
Pemstein, Daniel, Stephen Meserve, and James Melton. 2010. "Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type." Political Analysis 18(4): 426-449.
Polity5
Marshall, Monty G. 2020. "Polity5: Dataset Users' Manual v2018". Center for Systemic Peace. https://www.systemicpeace.org
Varieties of Democracy
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2025. "V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v15" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. doi: 10.23696/vdemds25 .
Maerz, Seraphine, Amanda Edgell, Sebastian Hellmeier, Nina Ilchenko, Linnea Fox. 'Vdemdata - an R package to load, explore and work with the most recent V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) and V-Party datasets'. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. 2025. https://www.v-dem.net and https://github.com/vdeminstitute/vdemdata
Examples
str(cw_democracy)
#> tibble [17,511 × 6] (S3: tbl_df/tbl/data.frame)
#> $ ccode : num [1:17511] 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
#> $ year : num [1:17511] 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 ...
#> $ euds : num [1:17511] 0.803 0.803 0.803 0.803 0.803 ...
#> $ aeuds : num [1:17511] -0.00435 -0.00435 -0.00435 -0.00435 -0.00435 ...
#> $ polity2 : num [1:17511] 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 7 ...
#> $ v2x_polyarchy: num [1:17511] 0.359 0.357 0.359 0.359 0.354 0.349 0.349 0.348 0.348 0.348 ...
head(cw_democracy)
#> # A tibble: 6 × 6
#> ccode year euds aeuds polity2 v2x_polyarchy
#> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
#> 1 2 1816 0.803 -0.00435 6 0.359
#> 2 2 1817 0.803 -0.00435 6 0.357
#> 3 2 1818 0.803 -0.00435 6 0.359
#> 4 2 1819 0.803 -0.00435 6 0.359
#> 5 2 1820 0.803 -0.00435 6 0.354
#> 6 2 1821 0.803 -0.00435 6 0.349