Partisan Politics in the Global Economy

A data set on government spending in select rich countries as a function of trade/GDP, financial openness, and the state-year-level engagement in trade unions (among other things). The data offer a means to quasi-replicate Garrett's (1998) argument about left-wing governments' ability to stem the tide of globalization's effect on decreased government spending. Data also draw inspiration from Rodrik (1998) and Garrett (2001).

Usage

PPGE

Format

A data frame with the following variables.

country

a character vector for the country

iso3c

a character vector for the three-character country ISO code

year

the year

govtspendgdp

total government spending over GDP

tradegdp

the volume of trade over GDP

kaopen

an index measuring a country's degree of capital account openness

ka_open

an alternate index measuring a country's degree of capital account openness, normalized to be between 0 and 1

v2catrauni

an estimate of a country's engagement in independent trade unions, generated by way of a Bayesian item response model

v2catrauni_ord

an estimate of a country's engagement in independent trade unions, on ordinal scale. See details.

ud

union density, as a percentage (i.e. union members/working employees)

urbanperc

the percentage of the population living in urban areas)

gdppc

GDP per capita, in constant 2015 USD

tpop

total population size, in units of individual humans

depratio

dependency ratio (see details)

Details

The data are an unbalanced panel with assorted quirks during its construction. Data missingness affecting Switzerland means it would only appear in the panel starting in the mid-1990s. The Netherlands has some missing data in the mid-1970s. Spain and Portugal appear at the start of the panel, though the transition to democracy for both wouldn't start until 1974/1975. Union density coverage is spotty for states like Greece and Portugal. The data also have some obvious COVID weirdness for 2020. Use that to inform whatever case or variable selection you would like to do. It may make sense to employ a temporal domain of something like 1975 to 2015, or whatever.

The dependency ratio is defined as the population aged 0-14, or 65 and above, divided over the "working-age" population of 15-64 (x 100).

Briefly: the government spending/GDP data come from the International Monetary Fund. The trade/GDP data come from the World Bank's API, as do the population, GDP per capita, and urbanization data (see their details). The more convention union density data come from OECD/ICWSS. The financial openness indicators come by way of the Chinn-Ito index. The engagement in trade unions data are from the Varieties of Democracy project. The ordinal measure of the trade union estimates communicate what percentag of the population is active in independent trade unions. Values include 0) virtually no one 1) a small share of the population (less than 5%), 2) A moderate share of the population (about 5 to 15%). 3) A large share of the population (about 16 % to 25%). 4) A very large share of the population (about 26% or more).

References

Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Rydén, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2022. "V-Dem Country-Year/Country-Date Dataset v12" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. doi: 10.23696/vdemds22

Chinn, Menzie D. and Hiro Ito. 2006. "What Matters for Financial Development? Capital Controls, Institutions, and Interactions." Journal of Development Economics 81(1): 163–192.

Garrett, Geoffrey. 1998. Partisan Politics in the Global Economy New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Garrett, Geoffrey. 2001. "Globalization and Government Spending around the World." Studies in Comparative International Development 35(4): 3-29.

Rodrik, Dani. 1998. "Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Government?" Journal of Political Economy 106: 997-1032.