In addition to the projects mentioned in chapter 22, several others in other areas of political science have worked to code nonnumeric data about politics to facilitate quantitative analyses of such information. This coding process results in spreadsheets and other datasets that record information about political activities, from State of the Union addresses to political rallies, in a structured, machine-readable format.
Major Sources: United States
Policy Agendas Project
The Policy Agendas Project (www.policyagendas.org) creates data sets that allow for rigorous analyses of changes in the U.S. federal government’s priorities, as well as certain nongovernmental factors, such as public opinion and media coverage, that help to drive those changes. The project has released several separate data sets for different types of political activities, such as congressional hearings, bills introduced in Congress, congressional roll call votes, State of the Union addresses, and executive orders. Each action is coded as related to one of the hundred-plus areas in which the federal government makes policy, from unemployment to federal holidays. Thus, users of these data sets can analyze when and why a given issue is discussed or acted upon more or less frequently by various branches of government. An online graphing tool allows less statistically inclined users to simply visualize the changes over time.
Supreme Court Database
The Supreme Court Database (http://scdb.wustl.edu) has coded all cases heard before the Supreme Court from 1946 until the most recent completed Court term on 247 different variables, covering everything from the chronology of the case to the legal issues it raised. The data can be downloaded in many different formats, and it can be analyzed and visualized online in a user-friendly interface. Want to see a chart showing the number of Supreme Court cases involving civil rights by year? From the “Analysis” page, two clicks gets you there.
Fraser Institute Mercatus Center (George Mason University)
Two libertarian-leaning organizations, the independent Fraser Institute in Canada and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia, rate all fifty U.S. states on their policies in a variety of areas. The Fraser Institute’s Free the World.com site (www.freetheworld.com/index.php), which is primarily focused on economic freedom, also rates the provinces of Canada and provides national and subnational rankings for many other countries. The Mercatus Center’s Freedom in the 50 States site (http://freedominthe50states.org) provides ratings in a variety of areas, including fiscal policies such as taxes and government spending; regulatory policies that impact economic freedom, such as restrictions in the markets for health insurance and cable television; and policies that impact personal freedom, such as restrictions on alcohol, marriage, and campaign finance. The Mercatus Center also publishes the raw data it uses to create its rankings (www.statepolicyindex.com/the-research/).
Major Sources: World
DataGov (Inter-American Development Bank)
DataGov (www.iadb.org/datagob/) is an extraordinarily comprehensive database of “governance indicators”—that is, variables that provide evidence of how democratically a country is governed and how well civil society and the rule of law function in that country. DataGov includes a few hundred such indicators, ranging from the extent of bribery in the country’s educational system to the freedom of the country’s press. The data is gathered from a wide range of sources, including Freedom House’s (www.freedomhouse.org) Freedom in the World: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties, Transparency International’s (www.transparency.org) Global Corruption Barometer, the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom (www.heritage.org/index/), and several other similar publications and databases. Although DataGov is produced by the Inter-American Development Bank, which primarily focuses on Latin America, it includes data for all countries of the world for many variables.
Polity Project
The Polity Project (www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm) is a long-running effort; it has been publishing data sets since the 1970s. Although the Polity data is distributed by the Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research (INSCR, see chapter 22), it deserves separate mention here because of its focus on internal governance. For every country with a population over 500,000 and for every year since 1800, the data set contains a small set of indicators of the democratic and authoritarian status and the political stability of the country. These indicators include the presence/absence of an orderly, institutionalized process for choosing the chief executive; the extent of legal restrictions on the country’s chief executive; and ratings of the competitiveness and openness of the political process.
Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone
Computational Event Data System
Several projects that code information about international conflict and violent terrorist attacks are mentioned in chapter 22. In addition to those projects, there have also been several similar efforts to code information about less violent or purely domestic events, such as strikes, protest marches, and domestic assassinations. The data sets created by these projects typically include structured information about such topics as the parties involved in the event, type of event (e.g., rally, bombing, government crackdown), and date and place of the event.
The most notable example may be the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT, http://gdeltproject.org). GDELT has assembled a large data set, covering nearly all countries of the world from 1979 to yesterday and containing hundreds of millions of events. New events are added every day. This feat is accomplished by using software to code news stories automatically rather than have human coders read and code the stories.
Another automated-coding project for this type of data is the Computational Event Data System (http://eventdata.parusanalytics.com), a descendent of an even older automated coding project, the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS). As KEDS and then as the Penn State Event Data Project, these data sets have been under construction since the early 1990s. Data sets covering specific areas—such as the Balkans, the Persian Gulf region, West Africa—and specific time periods are available.