Other Political Data (updated 2005)

This dataset primarily includes variables that the project has collected from other researchers. The variables are broadly divided into the following categories: Political Regime type, Political Participation, Military Expenditure, General Fiscal Policy, Dependency and Debt Measures, and General Trade indicators. The set includes measures from economic datasets that can reasonably be assumed to measure political decision making. Since different measures are used in different ways by researchers, the choice whether to include a variable in the economc.dta or politicl.dta was oftentimes quite subjective. We have chosen for example to treat inflation as an economic indicator rather than a policy variable and to treat government consumption as a policy variable. In any case, the variables from the two sets can easily be merged. Similarly government expenditure on the military is included in this dataset while other military variables can be found in the violence1.dta and violnce2.dta datasets. These violence datasets contain other political protest variables. These are separated from the rest of the political variables in part because there are simply so many of them but also to make a complementary dataset for the new Bates Violence collection.