Religion, Colonial Influence & Reproductive Freedom

This dataset supports the paper "Religion, Colonial Influence & Reproductive Freedom," which examines the relationship between U.S. colonial governance, Catholic institutional displacement, and property rights quality across twenty Latin American and Caribbean nations over 2015–2025, with a focused case study of Puerto Rico household demographic change from 1910 to 2023. Files included The International Property Rights Index panel data (IPRI 2007–2025, Excel workbook) provides the primary dependent variables: annual country-level scores on Legal and Political Environment (LP), Physical Property Rights (PPR), and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) sub-indices on a 0–10 scale. Both the full technical report and executive summary are included as reference documents. The V-Dem Country-Year Core dataset (v15, CSV) provides governance indicators including rule of law (v2x_rule), judicial constraints (v2x_jucon), civil liberties (v2xcl_rol), and civil society (v2xcs_ccsi) used to construct pre-period state capacity measures averaged over 1970–2014. The IPUMS USA microdata extract (usa_00002.csv) contains Puerto Rico household census and American Community Survey observations spanning 1910–2023, restricted to standard households (GQ=1, STATEFIP=72), with variables YEAR, NUMPREC, HHWT, STATEFIP, and GQ, used to construct the weighted average household size series for the interrupted time series analysis. The Pew Research Center 2014 report on Religion in Latin America is included as a PDF reference document containing the Catholic affiliation anchor data (1970 and 2014 country-level estimates) used to construct the time-varying Catholic share series. The analysis notebook (Protestant.ipynb) contains the complete Python replication code (v7, publication-ready) including panel construction, Mundlak-corrected Random Effects estimation, Between OLS, two-way Fixed Effects with drop_absorbed, interrupted time series models for Puerto Rico, Baron-Kenny bootstrap mediation, all robustness checks, and all figures and tables reported in the paper. Data provenance Real data loaded from files: IPRI scores (BD sheet), V-Dem governance indicators (1960–2020), IPUMS USA household microdata (1910–2023). Hardcoded from published sources: Catholic affiliation anchors (Pew Research Center 2014), Pentecostal denominational shares (Pew Research Center 2014), GDP approximations (World Bank WDI constant 2015 USD). Modeled and disclosed in paper: time-varying Catholic share (linear extrapolation of Pew 1970–2014 country-specific trends), time-varying log GDP per capita (World Bank 2014 baseline plus 2% annual real growth projection for years beyond V-Dem coverage). No variables are simulated. Replication All panel and cross-sectional results reported in the paper are fully reproducible from the included files by running Protestant.ipynb in Google Colab or a local Python environment with linearmodels, statsmodels, pandas, numpy, matplotlib, seaborn, and openpyxl installed. The notebook auto-installs dependencies. The IPUMS extract was obtained under standard academic use terms; researchers wishing to replicate the microdata analysis should register at ipums.org and request an equivalent extract using STATEFIP=72, GQ=1, variables YEAR, NUMPREC, HHWT, STATEFIP, GQ, covering all available Puerto Rico census and ACS years. V-Dem data are publicly available at v-dem.net. IPRI data are used under the International Property Rights Alliance's standard academic use terms. Key citations Ruggles, S., Flood, S., Sobek, M., Backman, D., Chen, A., Cooper, G., Richards, S., Rogers, R., and Schouweiler, M. IPUMS USA: Version 15.0. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2024. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V15.0 Coppedge, M. et al. V-Dem Dataset v15. Varieties of Democracy Project, 2025. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds25 Pew Research Center. Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, 2014.