political institutions and policy choice

General Political Science Resources

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• ICPSR Homepage
• Social Science Information Gateway
• The Almanac of Politics and Government, on-line
• US Political Science Associations (from APSA)
• List of US Political Science Departments
• Center for the Study of Democracy / UC Irvine

Institutions

Regime Type

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• One of the most commonly used measures of "democraticness" is the Gastil (democracy) Index. The Gastil index provides good coverage (many countries, 1972-). Information on the construction of the index can be got from Freedom House.

• New! Polity98: Regime Characteristics, 1800-1998 Jaggers, Keith and Ted Robert Gurr. May be downloaded directly in Excel or ASCII format.
• Polity III: Regime Type and Political Authority, 1800-1994; Jaggers, Keith and Ted Robert Gurr ; Description | Data has a number of variables also related to regime types. The set has good country coverage for many years. Variables include: Autocracy Score (AUTOC), Democracy Score (DEMOC), Executive Recruitment Regulation (XRREG), Monocratism (MONO): Independence of Chief Executive, Executive Constraints (XCONST).
  
  See also:
• Polity II: Political Structures and Regime Change, 1800-1986; Gurr, Ted Robert Description | data
  
  
• Polity Data: Persistence and Change in Political Systems, 1800-1971; Gurr, Ted Robert, and Erika Gurr; Description Data
  
  
• The Banks dataset (Banks, Arthur S. 1994 Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive . Center for Social Analysis, State University of New York at Binghamton. Binghamton, New York http://www.polsci.binghamton.edu/handbook.htm) has a wide range of variables and excellent coverage. It has data on almost every African country, and some variables go back as far as 1919. Variables include data on Type of Regime (Civilian/Military-Civilian/Military) and the Number of Major Constitutional Changes

Legislature

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• This project (Africa Growth Project) has collected data on legislative and executive institutions (Is there a legislature, was it filled via election, did multiple candidates stand for election to any seats, were multiple parties allowed to contest this election, did multiple candidates from multiple parties actually contest any seats). Not yet publicly available in 46 SSA countries for the period 1970-95. This data should be made public in 2000.
  
  

• Banks, again, has relevant data:

• I do not know of any sources of data on the policy positions of members of legislatures in developing countries. Much work has been done in this respect for much of the OECD [links].

   

Links to Parliaments

• Data on the share of seats held by different parties in different years from most of the following links.
  
  
• National Parliaments: National Parliaments
  
  
• Inter-Parliamentary Union
  
  
• Also: http://www.worldlib.org/parliaments.htmlhas weak coverage for developing countries but covers a wider range of governmental institutions.
  
  

  ACTION/EFF

Executive

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• Banks has: Type of Head of State; Premier; Effective Executive (Type); Effective Executive (Selection) [Direct election / Indirect election / not-elected]; Degree of Parliamentary Responsibility; Size of Cabinet; Number of Cabinet Changes; Changes in Effective Executive.
  
  
• This project has measures of Executive competitiveness scales for 46 SSA countries, 1970-1995(Is there an executive, was he was elected, did multiple candidates contest this election, , were multiple parties allowed to contest this election, did multiple candidates from multiple parties actually contest this election); Not yet publicly available.
  
  
• Polity98 has: XRREG Executive recruitment regulation: institutionalized procedures regarding the transfer of executive power.
  XRCOMP Executive recruitment competition: extent to which executives are chosen through competitive elections.
  XROPEN Executive recruitment openness: opportunity for non-elites to attain executive office.
  XCONST Executive constraints: operational (de facto) independence of chief executive.
  

Judiciary

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Bureaucracy

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• James E. Rauch and Peter B. Evans have produced a dataset on Bureacratic Structure and Bureaucratic Performance with 29 variables for 35 developing countries (4 from SSA) (data and codebook).
  
• Polity III (Gurr): Executive Recruitment Competition (XRCOMP); Executive Recruitment Openness (XROPEN)
  
• The International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) ratings provide popular measures of buraucratic quality used by Keefer and Knack and Easterly and Levine (see Political Risk Services, here).
  
• Business and Environmental Risk Intelligence (BERI) and Business International also provide measures of "bureaucratic delays" and "bureaucracy and red tape".
  
• The IRIS Center (Center on Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector) works to improve data on bureaucratic performance.

   

Constitutions

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• There is a large selection of national constitutions available on-line. For a number of these, past as well as present constitutions are available at http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/law/index.html

Size of Government

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• WDI98 contains a measure of employment levels in state owned enterprises. For more information, see Tables: WDI 5.8. (GB.SOE.EMPL.ZS)

Elections

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• Parliamentary elections around the world.
  
  
  
• The Lijphart Elections Archive.
  
  
  
• FREEDOM HOUSE Home Page
  
  
• Klipsan Press Election Notes Good source of information about recent and forthcoming elections.
  
  
  
• The IFES maintains an Election Calendar that lists upcoming elections around the world.
  
  
  
• The Journal of Democracy has an Election Watch
  
  
  
• The Norwegian Helsinki Committee monitors elections and human rights and produces reports.
  
  
  
• World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators III

Election Results

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• Derksen's National level results with parties and candidates here
  
  
• Lijphart listing of Online Datasets with District Level Election Results for 42, mostly developed, countries: http://dodgson.ucsd.edu/lij/list.html
  
  
• Banks 1994: Voter Turnout; Registered Voters; Votes Cast, Lower House of Legislature; Number of Seats, Largest Party in Legislature, Size of Legislature/Number of Seats, Largest Party; Party Fractionalization Index;
  
  
• Taylor and Jodice 1982: World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. Many developing countries covered, measured in 1978. Most tables have information for 1960 and 1975-78; and Party fractionalization, based on Votes and Legislative seats.
  
  
• SSDC, Lijphart Archive

Election Timing

• Timings of elections for all countries since 1990 from Derksen

Election Rules

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• Lijphart has created a "formulaic matrix" that describes the electoral systems for most countries in the world. The matrix provides a summary of a nation's "electoral formulas," or the methods for translating candidate and/or list vote totals into an allocation of seats among cartels, lists or candidates. All matrices appear as Appendix A in Cox, Gary W. 1997. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

   

Parties

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• Derksen provides an excellent website with lists of parties in every country, with the number of seats they have and provides links to these parties' homepages when they exist.

   

Individuals

Rulers

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• Leadership Views: Chiefs of State and Cabinet Members, by country
  

• "Athens" guide to Rulers This site contains lists of heads of state and heads of government (and, in certain cases, de facto leaders which don't occupy either of those formal positions) of all currently existing countries and territories. It also links to Ministers of Foreign Affairs
  

• Also http://web.jet.es/ziaorarr/00index.htm for Zarate's listing of World Leaders. [also here]
  
• Bueno de Mesquita and Siverson's Heads of State Data | codebook | readme file)
  
• World Rulers and Leaders, 1946BC - 1996
  
• New Bates Institutions dataset has information on mode of ascent to power (SSA, 1970-1995) (not yet released)

Interests and Participation

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Ethnicity

• Morisson has detailed data for SSA: Morrison, Donald George, Robert Mitchell and John Paden, Black Africa, A Comparative Handbook, Irvington, New York, 1989. This data is all on-line. Most data was collected prior to 1970.
  
  
• Minorities at Risk : Gurr, Ted. 1996. Minorities at Risk Phase III Dataset, University of Maryland. Information on group organizations and activism; large range of developing countries, very limited time series data (mostly 1990s); Bases of Group Identity, Inter-group differentials, Collective disadvantages, Degree of Group Cohesion / factionalization.

• Bratton and Van de Walle also have a measure of Ethnic divisions [more info]

• ELF: The most common measure used by Mauro, Sachs, Easterly and Levine and others is ELF. ELF quantifies ethno-linguistic fractionalization in countries and represents the probability that two individuals drawn randomly will be from different groups: The ELF index is calculated by Taylor and Hudson (World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, 1972). This variable may be constructed from the Morrison dataset and can be downloaded from our controls dataset. Note however that ELF does not change over time (measured in 1960).
  

   

Language Groups

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• Ethnologue Linguistic Data [Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas]; data on 6703 languages currently spoken around the world, along with some socioeconomic and demographic variables)
• 1995 Ethnologue data | information
• Country Language Data [from Jon Haveman at Purdue, possibly restricted access]
• Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal have a variable: % of population not speaking a country's official language, in The State of the World, Atlas, 1995.
• Sullivan rates countries on ethnic or linguistic tensions (more information; link)
• Our controls dataset has a variable with information on the most spoken language in 46 SSA countries.

   

Civil Liberties

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• From Polity98: PARREG Regulation of participation: development of institutional structures for political expression.
  PARCOMP Competitiveness of participation: extent to which non-elites are able to access institutional structures for political expression.
  
• Gastil / Freedom House Civil Liberties index, information on these can be got from Freedom House, Freedom House. This data is also available in our political dataset.

• Global Press Freedom, 1948-1994, by Van Belle | codebook
  
• Taylor and Jodice: Political rights, Civil Rights, Political Discrimination, Economic Discrimination, Voter turnout, Organized Labor as % of total labor force.

• From Polity III(Gurr): Geographic Centralization of State Authority (CENT)

Income Inequality

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• The Deininger and Squire dataset from the World Bank provides the most exhaustive dataset on income distribution.
  
  

• International Social Survey Program ICPSR #06493 18 Countries, mainly the developed world plus a few Eastern European countries and the Philippines.

• Comparative Project On Class Structure And Class Consciousness ICPSR #09323
  
• Wright, Erik Olin, et al.; 10 Countries from the developed world, no cross-sections, all during the 1980s. br>
  

• Taylor and Jodice. Income distribution; quintiles and sectoral and land inequality Ginis. [link from above]

Corruption and Risk

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• IRIS Index: (University of Maryland) (1982+)1.Government repudiation of contracts (0-10 scale)2.Risk of expropriation (0-10)3.Corruption (0-6)4.Law and order tradition: IRIS name - "rule of law" (0-6) 5.Bureaucratic quality (0-6). [Presently partly included in our politcal dataset]
  
  
• Internet Corruption Perception Index - Home Page
  
  
• BERI Index: Very patchy, it only covers 4 SSA countries for example (1972+). [Presently partly included in our politcal dataset]

  1. Bureaucratic delays

  2. Enforceability of contracts

  3. Nationalization risk

• BICR/EIU : (used by Mauro) has very patchy coverage, 4 SSA countries; Includes interesting looking variables: Political Stability ; Probability of Opposition Group Takeover; ; Stability of Labor; Relationship with Neighboring Countries: Terrorism; Size and Influence of the Middle Class; Legal System, Judiciary; The degree to which the bureaucracy represents an obstacle to business; Corruption. Coverage is too poor to judge usefulness. [Presently partly included in our politcal dataset]

• Internet Corruption Ranking - Home Page

Foreign investor risk guides

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• Political Risk Services provide monthly International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) data
• Evans & Rauch: cross sectional evaluation of assessments of multiple dimensions of bureaucratic organization in 30 middle income countries.

Policy Choice [very provisional]

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General

• Index of Economic Freedom (Heritage Foundation) http://www.heritage.org/heritage/library/categories/forpol/econ_index/ch5toc.html.cgi : Subjective assessment ratings, 1-5 on 10 factors: Trade Policy, Taxation, Monetary Policy, Wage and Price Controls, Property Rights, Regulation

Trade Policy

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• Data on trade policy in Africa is in a sorry state. First of all the data on trade is patchy. On the poverty of Africa trade data see: A. J. Yeats (1997) "Implications of the Quality of African Trade Statistics for the Formulation of Effective Regional Integration and Trade Policies"; paper prepared for the ECA meeting of African Trade Ministers, Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, 23-4 May 1997. Secondly trade policy is in general tremenduously difficult to measure. Here are the main ways in which resaerchers try to capture trade policy. We will be adding links for these different approaches soon: 1. Outcomes
  1.1. "Openness": (X+M)/Y [eg Summers and Heston]
  1.2. "Openness" weighted by factors such as geographic location, external transport links etc.: see Balassa 1985
  1.3. Ratio of Trade taxes to the value of trade. This is almost an incidence measure. Used by Stryker and Pandolfi inter alia.Note though that a vey high tariff may prohibit imports of some good in which case taxes levied on this good will be 0.
  1.4. Black Market Premium; to capture protection via the exchange rate. Used by Stryker and Pandolfi, also a part of the Sachs Warner measure.
  1.5. Import penetration Ratios: Imports/GDP; Imports/Aggregate Consumption.
  1.6. Comparisons of Domestic and border prices of similar products, adjusted for transportration costs and distribution mark-ups (this is supposed to capture effects of NTBs). See WDR 1991. Misses out on export taxes and includes non-tariff taxes.
  1.7. Exchange Rate based Measures. BMP and Change in REER.
  
  
  2. Incidence
  2.1. Average Tariffs: Average Statutory tariff
  2.2. Average Tariff: Average Collection Rate [import duties/value of imports]
  2.3. Statutory Rates weighted by production shares.
  2.4. Prevalence of NTBs: number of categories covered by NTBs ; possibly weighted by production shares.
  2.5. Anderson and Neary: "trade restrictiveness index". equals the uniform tariff that is welfare equivalent to a given pattern of trade protection.
  2.6. Heritage Trade policy Index (used in PREM) What is this?
  2.7. "Effective Rate of Protection"
  
  
• Many quantitative studies on African trade policy (from the International Division of the World Bank).
  
• [Link to WTO integrated database; Only Senegal and Zimbabwe reported data]
  
• WTO Trade Statistics
  
• (US) Imports / Exports data provided by Robert Feenstra
• World Trade Flows, 1970-1992, With Production and Tariff Data. Feenstra, Robert C., Robert E. Lipsey and Harry P. Bowen, NBER dataset, available on CD ROM. See NBER paper 5910 in NBER's listing of papers on trade and investment.
  
• Tariff Barriers data an be got from UNCTAD [link]. Barro and Lee use UNCTAD data to construct such a variable for intermediates and capital goods (OWTI). Handbook of International Trade and Development Statistics
• Data on Non Tariff Barriers can also be got from UNCTAD. Barro and Lee use UNCTAD data to construct such a variable for intermediates and capital goods (OWQI). Handbook of International Trade and Development Statistics

• Market Access Database (EU): http://mkaccdb.eu.int Sectoral and Trade Barriers Database for 39 non-EU countries (many developing).The EU also has databases on: Applied Tariffs Database, WTO Bound Tariffs Database GATS Info-Point Although we have no further information on these databases at present.

Monetary Policy

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• All we have are outputs - M1, M2, inflation etc
• Banks 1994: Age of Currency in Months (since introduction of new monetary system or reevaluation of currency by more than plus or minus 5%)
• Central Banks -- Measures of central bank independence (Cukierman, et al.);Bank regulation [link]

Exchange Rate Policy

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[enter information]

Policy agreements

• List of IDA approved projects available from http://www.ifc.org