prepare_data: Prepare democracy data before replicating the UDS model
In xmarquez/QuickUDS: Extend the Unified Democracy Scores easily

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Note References Examples

This function is designed to take the democracy data included in this package and put it in a form suitable for use with the mirt package to replicate the UDS model. It takes a data frame and tries to determine, from the colum names, which variables contain democracy scores.

1	prepare_data(data, .funs)

data

A dataset of democracy scores. For the function to do anything, the column names must contain at least one of the following strings: anckar, arat, blm, bmr, bollen, doorenspleet, wgi, gwf, hadenius, kailitz, lied, munck, pacl, peps, polyarchy, polity, prc, PIPE, svmdi, svolik, ulfelder, utip, v2x, vanhanen_democratization, vanhanen_pmm, or wth. For details of these variables, see the documentation for democracy.

.funs

A names list of functions to modify the columns. It defaults to the following:

funs(arat = cut(., breaks = c(0, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 109), labels = 1:7, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE), hadenius = cut(., breaks = c(0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10), labels = 1:8, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE), bollen = cut(., breaks = c(0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100), labels = 1:10, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE), vanhanen = cut(., breaks = c(0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 50), labels = 1:8, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE), munck = cut(., breaks = c(0, 0.5, 0.75, 0.99, 1), labels = 1:4, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE), polyarchy_dimensions = cut(., breaks = 20, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE, ordered_result = TRUE), polity = ifelse(. < -10, NA, .), v2x = cut(., breaks = 20, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE, ordered_result = TRUE), v2x_* = cut(., breaks = 20, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE, ordered_result = TRUE), svmdi = cut(., breaks = 20, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE, ordered_result = TRUE), eiu = cut(., breaks = 20, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE, ordered_result = TRUE), wgi = cut(., breaks = 20, include.lowest = TRUE, right = FALSE, ordered_result = TRUE), peps = round(.), other = as.numeric(unclass(factor(.))))

If the column names contain the strings arat, blm, bollen,wgi, hadenius, munck, pacl, peps, polyarchy_inclusion_dimension, polyarchy_contestation_dimension, polity, prc, v2x, vanhanen_pmm, or vanhanen_democratization, the function performs the following transformations by default:

arat: Following Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton's replication code (Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013), the function cuts Arat (1991)'s 0-109 democracy score into 7 intervals with the following cutoffs: 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 8.

bollen: Following Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton's replication code (Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013), the function cuts Bollen's (2001)'s 0-100 democracy score into 10 intervals with the following cutoffs: 10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80, and 90. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 10.

wgi: If the World Governance Indicator's index of voice and acocuntability is included in the file, the function cuts it into 20 categories. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 20.

hadenius: Following Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton's replication code (Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013), the function cuts Hadenius (1992)'s 0-10 democracy score into 8 intervals with the following cutoffs: 1, 2,3,4, 7, 8, and 9. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 8.

munck: Following Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton's replication code (Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013), the function cuts Munck's (2009)'s 0-1 democracy score into 4 intervals with the following cutoffs: 0.5,0.5,0.75, and 0.99. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 4.

peps: If any of the variants of the Participation-Enhanced Polity Score (Moon et al 2006) is included in the file, the function rounds its value (eliminates the decimal) and then transforms it into an ordinal measure from 1 to 21.

polity: Following Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton's replication code (Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013), the function takes the polity scores and puts NA for any values below -10, and then transforms it into an ordinal measure from 1 to 21.

polyarchy_inclusion_dimension, polyarchy_contestation_dimension: If any of the polyarchy inclusion or contestation dimensions from Coppedge, Alvarez and Maldonado (2008) are included, it cuts them into into 20 categories. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 20.

v2x: If any of the v2x_ continuous indexes of democracy from the V-Dem dataset (Coppedge et al 2015) are included in the file, the function cuts them into 20 categories. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 20.

vanhanen_democratization or vanhanen_pmm: Following Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton's replication code (Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton 2013), the function cuts Vanhanen's (2012)'s index of democratization into 8 intervals with the following cutoffs: 5,10,15,20,25,30, and 35. The resulting score is ordinal from 1 to 8.

The function also recognizes the following column names (or partial column names - it also recognizes, e.g., pmm_blm) as measures of democracy: anckar (from Anckar and Fredriksson 2018), blm (from Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney 2005), bmr (from Boix, Miller, and Rosato 2012), doorenspleet (from Doorenspleet 2000), e_v2x (the "ordinal" indexes from the V-dem project, Coppedge at al 2015), freedomhouse or fh (from Freedom House - freedom scale must be reversed so that "more freedom" is higher), gwf (from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz 2014 - the dichotomous democracy indicator only), kailitz (from Kailitz 2013 - democracy/non-democracy indicator), lied or lexical_index (from Skaaning, Gerring, and Bartusevicius 2015), mainwaring (from Mainwaring and Perez Linan 2008), magaloni (from Magaloni, Min, Chu 2013 - democracy/non-democracy indicator), pacl (from Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland 2010), pitf (from Goldstone et al 2010 or Taylor and Ulfelder 2015), polyarchy (from Coppedge and Reinicke 1991), prc (from Gasiorowski 1996 or Reich 2002), PIPE (from Przeworski 2010), reign (from Bell 2016), svmdi (from Grundler and Krieger 2018, 2016), svolik (from Svolik 2012, democracy/dictatorship indicator only), ulfelder (from Ulfelder 2012), utip (from Hsu 2008), and wth or wahman_teorell_hadenius (from Wahman, Teorell, and Hadenius 2013). In each of these cases the function transforms the values of these scores by running as.numeric(unclass(factor(x))), which transforms them into ordinal variables from 1 to the number of categories.

For details of these scores, see the documentation for democracy.

It is also possible to change these defaults.

A data frame with the transformed scores, if any.

Warning! The function does not perform any sanity checks. It will try to transform anything that has the right name. You should always check the results make sense.

Anckar, Carsten and C. Fredriksson. 2018. "Classifying political regimes 1800-2016: a typology and a new dataset". European Political Science. DOI: 10.1057/s41304-018-0149-8. Data and codebook available at https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-018-0149-8.

Arat, Zehra F. 1991. Democracy and human rights in developing countries. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Bell, Curtis. 2016. The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset (REIGN).http://oefresearch.org/datasets/reign

Boix, Carles, Michael Miller, and Sebastian Rosato. 2012. A Complete Data Set of Political Regimes, 1800-2007. Comparative Political Studies 46 (12): 1523-1554. Original data available at https://sites.google.com/site/mkmtwo/democracy-v2.0.dta?attredirects=0

Bollen, Kenneth A. 2001. "Cross-National Indicators of Liberal Democracy, 1950-1990." 2nd ICPSR version. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1998. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2001. Original data available at http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/02532.xml.

Bowman, Kirk, Fabrice Lehoucq, and James Mahoney. 2005. Measuring Political Democracy: Case Expertise, Data Adequacy, and Central America. Comparative Political Studies 38 (8): 939-970. http://cps.sagepub.com/content/38/8/939. Data available at http://www.blmdemocracy.gatech.edu/.

Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Jennifer Gandhi, and James Raymond Vreeland. 2010. "Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited." Public Choice. 143(1):67-101. Original data available at https://sites.google.com/site/joseantoniocheibub/datasets/democracy-and-dictatorship-revisited.

Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning, and Jan Teorell, with David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Jeffrey Staton, Brigitte Zimmerman, Frida Andersson, Valeriya Mechkova, Farhad Miri. 2015. V-Dem Codebook v5. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. Original data available at https://v-dem.net/en/data/.

Coppedge, Michael and Wolfgang H. Reinicke. 1991. Measuring Polyarchy. In On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants, ed. Alex Inkeles. New Brunswuck, NJ: Transaction pp. 47-68.

Coppedge, A. Alvarez and C. Maldonado. 2008. "Two Persistent Dimensions of Democracy: Contestation and Inclusiveness". The Journal of Politics 70.03, pp. 632-647. DOI: 10.1017/S0022381608080663.

Doorenspleet, Renske. 2000. Reassessing the Three Waves of Democratization. World Politics 52 (03): 384-406. DOI: 10.1017/S0043887100016580. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0043887100016580.

Kaufmann, D. and A. Kraay. 2016. Worldwide Governance Indicators. 2016. http://www.govindicators.org.

Freedom House. 2015. "Freedom in the World." Original data available at http://www.freedomhouse.org.

Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1996. "An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset." Comparative Political Studies 29(4):469-483.

Geddes, Barbara, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz. 2014. Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set. Perspectives on Politics 12 (1): 313-331. Original data available at http://dictators.la.psu.edu/.

Goldstone, Jack, Robert Bates, David Epstein, Ted Gurr, Michael Lustik, Monty Marshall, Jay Ulfelder, and Mark Woodward. 2010. A Global Model for Forecasting Political Instability. American Journal of Political Science 54 (1): 190-208. DOI:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00426.x

Grundler, K. and T. Krieger. 2018. "Machine Learning Indices, Political Institutions, and Economic Development". Report. CESifo Group Munich, 2018. https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6930.pdf.

Grundler, K. and T. Krieger. 2016. "Democracy and growth: Evidence from a machine learning indicator". European Journal of Political Economy 45, pp. 85-107. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2016.05.005.

Hadenius, Axel. 1992. Democracy and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hadenius, Axel & Jan Teorell. 2007. "Pathways from Authoritarianism", Journal of Democracy 18(1): 143-156.

Hsu, Sara "The Effect of Political Regimes on Inequality, 1963-2002," UTIP Working Paper No. 53 (2008), http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/papers/utip_53.pdf. Data available for download at http://utip.gov.utexas.edu/data/.

Kailitz, Steffen. 2013. Classifying political regimes revisited: legitimation and durability. Democratization 20 (1): 39-60. Original data available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2013.738861.

Mainwaring, Scott, Daniel Brinks, and Anibal Perez Linan. 2008. "Political Regimes in Latin America, 1900-2007." Original data available from http://kellogg.nd.edu/scottmainwaring/Political_Regimes.pdf.

Magaloni, Beatriz, Jonathan Chu, and Eric Min. 2013. Autocracies of the World, 1950-2012 (Version 1.0). Dataset, Stanford University. Original data and codebook available at http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/research/autocracies_of_the_world_dataset/

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Munck, Gerardo L. 2009. Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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.

Pemstein, Daniel, Stephen A. Meserve, and James Melton. 2013. "Replication data for: Democratic Compromise: A Latent Variable Analysis of Ten Measures of Regime Type." In: Harvard Dataverse. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/PMM

Przeworski, Adam et al. 2013. Political Institutions and Political Events (PIPE) Data Set. Department of Politics, New York University. https://sites.google.com/a/nyu.edu/adam-przeworski/home/data

Reich, G. 2002. Categorizing Political Regimes: New Data for Old Problems. Democratization 9 (4): 1-24. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/714000289.

Skaaning, Svend-Erik, John Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusevicius. 2015. A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy. Comparative Political Studies 48 (12): 1491-1525. Original data available from http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/skaaning.

Svolik, Milan. 2012. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Original data available from http://campuspress.yale.edu/svolik/the-politics-of-authoritarian-rule/.

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Ulfelder, Jay. 2012. "Democracy/Autocracy Data Set." In: Harvard Dataverse. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/18836.

Vanhanen, Tatu. 2012. "FSD1289 Measures of Democracy 1810-2012." Original data available from http://www.fsd.uta.fi/english/data/catalogue/FSD1289/meF1289e.html

Wahman, Michael, Jan Teorell, and Axel Hadenius. 2013. Authoritarian regime types revisited: updated data in comparative perspective. Contemporary Politics 19 (1): 19-34.