The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project: Historical State Names Data Set

The ICOW Project has also collected several supplementary data sets to help in subsequent data collection and analysis. While not directly involving issues, these data sets are important for testing various issue-related hypotheses (involving the impact of the regional or global institutional context, for example) and for collecting data using historical reference sources that may refer to states or other entities by non-current names. Historical State Names The ICOW historical state names data set includes alternative names (or alternative spellings of names) for each nation-state in the COW interstate system.
<br /><br />The primary purpose of this data set is to assist data coders (or other researchers using historical sources), who can often be confused by references to entity names that no longer exist or are no longer used (leading to a risk of ignored or miscoded data). The data set attempts to list all relatively common alternative names that have been used to refer to each state over the past two centuries, so that the researcher can determine easily that "New Granada" actually refers to Colom
bia rather than risking data loss or errors.