Dataset for "Predictors of Militarisation 2011–2021"

This dataset supports the empirical analyses presented in Cristancho, Bradford, and Pósch (2026), which examines the political and structural predictors of militarisation across nation-states' coercive apparatuses between 2011 and 2021. It contains a curated selection of variables compiled from publicly available sources and harmonised for cross-national comparability. The dataset's core structure is built on the Quality of Government (QoG) Standard Time-Series Dataset (January 2024 edition), developed by the Quality of Government Institute at the University of Gothenburg (Teorell et al., 2024). This foundation was extended with additional indicators drawn from the World Bank World Development Indicators, the Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC) Global Militarisation Index, the World Inequality Database (WID), and the START Global Terrorism Database. The three militarisation measures used as dependent variables — the original GMI, GMI-PC1, and CA-PC1 — were derived from principal component analyses conducted by the authors using BICC and World Bank data, as described in the paper. All sources were harmonised using ISO3 country codes and aligned by year. The resulting dataset is a balanced country-year panel covering 161 countries over 11 years (2011–2021), yielding 1,771 observations prior to multiple imputation. This dataset is provided exclusively for replication of the analyses presented in Cristancho, Bradford, and Pósch (2026). Users requiring the underlying data for independent research purposes should cite and access the original sources directly. The authors make no claim to ownership of the original data.