Replication Data for: What’s in a Name? Towards the Study of Names in Political Science

It is overdue for political science to consider the names of nation-states, the discipline’s primary unit of analysis and the world’s largest, richest, and most powerful institutions. This research note begins such analysis by examining the descriptors used in formal country names including Empire, Kingdom, Islamic, Republic, Democratic, Socialist, and People’s. I analyze country names as independent variables, hypothesizing that they have value as signals of political characteristics. To test my hypotheses, I turn to the Varieties of Democracy dataset. I use fixed effects panel regressions to examine if countries’ descriptors correlate with the characteristics they name. I find that except for the democratic descriptor all others are surprisingly accurate. This is the first step towards developing an understanding of names in political science while adding a new tool for comparative politics.