Inequality and Instability: The Relation of Land Tenure to Politics (Russett, 1964)

A data set on inequality and political instability, to replicate an analysis from Russett (1964).

Usage

Russett64

Format

A data frame with 47 observations on the following 10 variables.

country

a character vector for the country

demcat

a character vector for the type of political system, either "Stable Democracies", "Unstable Democracies", or "Dictatorships"

gini

a numeric vector for the GINI coefficient

perc_farmsh

a numeric vector for the percent of farms with half the land

perc_farmsr

a numeric vector for the percent of farms that are rented

pi

a numeric vector for personnel instability

eiw

a numeric vector for Eckstein's internal war measure

deaths

a numeric vector for deaths from civil group violence per one million

gnppc

a numeric vector for gross national product per capita

perc_lfa

a numeric vector for the percent of the labor force in agriculture

Details

The data are scraped from Table 1 and Table 3 of his article, to the best of my ability. I was initially hoping this could be a problem for ChatGPT and its OCR functionality. However, ChatGPT made an absolute mess of Table 1. The bulk of this is hand-coded. The data, as of right now, can effectively reproduce what Russett (1964) reports in his analyses, but it is not identical.

You should read the article to see the assorted citations and data caveats that Russett (1964) reports. Those are ultimately suppressed/ignored here.

References

Russett, Bruce M. "Inequality and Instability: The Relation of Land Tenure to Politics." World Politics 16(3): 442–54