Lipset59: Democracy and Economic Development (Around) 1949-50

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Democracy and Economic Development (Around) 1949-50

Description

A data set on democracy and economic development for 48 countries that Lipset (1959) first described.

Usage

Lipset59

Format

A data frame with 48 observations on the following 11 variables.

country

a character country for an English country name

cat

a category for the country by their region and level of democracy

iso3c

a three-character ISO code

wbgdp2011est

an estimated gross domestic product in 2011 USD

wbpopest

an estimated population size

unpop

a population size (in thousands)

uninc

a national income (in millions)

unincpc

a national income per capita

xm_qudsest

a "Quick UDS" estimate of democracy on a latent scale (see details)

v2x_polyarchy

the Varieties of Democracy "polyarchy" estimate (see details)

polity2

the polity2 score from the Polity project (see details)

Details

The three variables with the prefix of un nominally come from the United Nations Statistical Division for 1949/1950, but are actually retrieved from Andic and Peacock (1961). Andic and Peacock (1961) note you should be skeptical of Soviet-style calculations of national income and thus don't include it in the data they make available.

Anything else is explicitly benchmarked to 1950 as a referent year. The GDP and population estimates come by way of Anders et al. (2020). You can manually create your own GDP per capita variable here because the GDP is demarcated in dollars and the population size is in units of 1. Take one and divide it over the other.

The democracy variables are all unique in their own way. The "Quick UDS" estimates are generated to be latent and, globally, have a mean that approximates 0 and a standard deviation that approximates 1. In the regression context, that would mean a coefficient would communicate something like a magnitude change across a standard deviation on the scale. The "polyarchy" estimate has a theoretical minimum of 0 and a theoretical maximum of 1. In the regression context, that would mean a coefficient communicates a min/max effect. The Polity project estimate comes from a usual, additive index scale of -10 to 10 and a regression coefficient communicates something much less exotic. It's a unit change on this scale.

In all cases, higher values of democracy = more "democraticness", for lack of a better term. The "Quick UDS" estimate has the added quirk that converting the quantity to a probability (by way of pnorm()) communicates a probability that the observation in question is a 1 (i.e. a democracy). Try it out with some of the highest and lowest observations to see this in practice.

References

Anders, Therese, Christopher J. Fariss, and Jonathan N. Markowitz. 2020. "Bread Before Guns or Butter: Introducing Surplus Domestic Product (SDP)" International Studies Quarterly 64(2): 392–405.

Andic, Suphan and Alan T. Peacock. 1961. "The International Distribution of Income, 1949 and 1957." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General) 124(2): 206-218.

Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Luhrmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Agnes Cornell, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerlow, Valeriya Mechkova, Johannes von Romer, Aksel Sundtrom, Eitan Tzelgov, Luca Uberti, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2020. "V-Dem Codebook v10" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy" American Political Science Review 53(1): 69-105.

Marshall, Monty G., Ted Robert Gurr, and Keith Jaggers. 2017. "Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2017." Center for Systemic Peace.

Marquez, Xavier, "A Quick Method for Extending the Unified Democracy Scores" (March 23, 2016). \Sexpr[results=rd]{tools:::Rd_expr_doi("10.2139/ssrn.2753830")}

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.

stevedata documentation built on Nov. 5, 2025, 5:44 p.m.