Gleditsch-Ward (Independent States) System Membership Data (1816-2017)

These are the independent states in Gleditsch and Ward's data.

Usage

gw_states

Format

A data frame with 216 observations on the following 5 variables.

gwcode

a numeric vector for the Gleditsch-Ward country code

stateabb

a character vector for state abbreviation

statename

a character vector for the state name

startdate

the start date in the data

enddate

the end date in the data

Details

Data originally provided by Gleditsch with no column names. Column names were added before some light re-cleaning in order to generate these data. "Wuerttemberg" and "Cote D'Ivoire" in the statename column needed to be renamed to ensure maximal compliance with CRAN, which raises notes for every non-ASCII character that appears in its package. I do not think this to be problematic at all and, after all, state names should never be a basis for something like a match or merge you would do in countrycode.

The functions that previously used these data no longer use these data. They instead use a copy of the data in the isard package I also maintain.

References

Gleditsch, Kristian S. and Michael D. Ward. 1999. "A Revised List of Independent States since the Congress of Vienna." International Interactions 25(4): 393–413.