Data Used in Publications

on Democratization

by Michael Coppedge

Data on democratic diffusion (Stata file) (Codebook)
These are the variables used in Daniel Brinks and Michael Coppedge, “Diffusion Is No Illusion: Neighbor Emulation in the Third Wave of Democracy” Comparative Political Studies 39:4 (May 2006): 463-489.
 

The Polyarchy and Contestation Scales for 1985 and 2000 (Excel spreadsheet with full documentation) (SPSS file with data only)
These are Guttman scales, and their component variables, measuring levels of the contestation dimension of polyarchy in every independent state in the world as of mid-1985 and mid-2000. There is also an indicator of the extent of the suffrage for 1985. The Polyarchy scale is the one documented in Michael Coppedge and Wolfgang Reinicke, "Measuring Polyarchy," Studies in Comparative International Development 25:1 (Spring 1990): 51-72; and used in "Modernization and Thresholds of Democracy," in Manus Midlarsky, ed., Inequality, Democracy, and Economic Development, pp. 177-201 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). This has now been updated for 2000. The Contestation scale is a slightly less precise but more reliable version, coded by students at the University of Notre Dame in 2003-05. See the Excel file for more information.

Contestation and Inclusiveness, 1950-2000  (SPSS file) (codebook)
These are the two principal components of 13-15 indicators of democracy, including those compiled by Freedom House; Polity; Arthur Banks; Alvarez, Cheibub, Limongi, and Przeworski, as updated by Cheibub and Gandhi; Bollen; and Cingranelli and Richards. The dataset covers most countries in the world from 1950 through 2000. In an article in the Journal of Politics (July 2008), Angel Alvarez, Claudia Maldonado, and I argue that these principal components, which capture 75 percent of variation in the most commonly used democracy indicators, measure Robert Dahl's two dimensions of polyarchy: contestation and inclusiveness. We recommend that scholars use the standardized versions of these components (CONTESTstd and INCLUSstd), which have been adjusted to be comparable from year to year. [Updated 6/25/2009 to remove some meaningless observations for nonexistent country-years.]

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