Christopher Gandrud
(간드루드 크리스토파)

Previously on The Political Methodologist, I posted updates to the Database of Political Institutions' election timing variable: yrcurnt . That set of corrections was only for the current 28 EU member states. I’ve now expanded the corrections to include most other OECD countries. 1 Again, there were many missing elections: Change list Country Changes Australia Corrects missing 1998 election year. Canada Corrects missing 2000, 2006, 2008, 2011 election years. Iceland Corrects missing 2009 election year. Ireland Corrects missing 2011 election. Japan Corrects missing 2005 and 2012 elections. Corrects misclassification of the 2003 and 2009 elections, which were originally erroneously labeled as being in 2004 and 2008, respectively.  Import into R To import the most recent corrected version of the data into R simply use: election_time <- rio::import('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/christophergandrud/yrcurnt_corrected/master/data/yrcurnt...

A lot of progress has been made on improving political scientists’ ability to access data ‘programmatically’, e.g. data can be downloaded with source code R. Packages such as WDI for World Bank Development Indicator and dvn for many data sets stored on the Dataverse Network make it much easier for political scientists to use this data as part of a highly integrated and reproducible workflow . There are nonetheless still many commonly used political science data sets that aren’t easily accessible to researchers. Recently, I’ve been using the Database of Political Institutions (DPI) , Polity IV democracy indicators, and Reinhart and Rogoff’s (2010) financial crisis occurrence data. All three of these data sets are freely available for download online. However, getting them, cleaning them up, and merging them together is kind of a pain. This is especially true for the Reinhart and Rogoff data, which is in 4 Excel files with over 70 individual shee...