Intranational Political Interactions (IPI) Project

The IPI project was designed to measure political conflict and cooperation within societies through the coding of political event reports from international, regional, and local sources. These events were coded on two ten point scales which reflect the severity of various cooperative and conflictual statements and actions. This scaled events data can be used to calculate the volume and intensity of political conflict and cooperation within the domestic polity. In addition to facilitating the calculation of general levels of political conflict, the IPI coding scheme allows the examination of the dynamics of interaction among specific groups within the society. IPI gives scholars the ability to track interactions among social groups and between the state and social groups. We have completed the first round of coding for 14 countries. Unfortunately, human coding is prone to error, and we found that we needed to do a second round of coding, which we call editing the data (for a discussion, please see Davis, Leeds and Moore 1998, available for download from the papers page of this site). While our funding covered the coding of the data, we did not secure funding for the editing, and that has been done on an on-and-off basis since 1996. Thus, to date w e have two types of data: coded and edited.