Center for Systemic Peace

Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM): Polity IV Project

The Polity data series, originally designed by Ted Robert Gurr, contains coded annual information on regime and authority characteristics for 161 independent states (fundamentally those with greater than 500,000 total population) in the global state system and covers the years 1800-2002. The Polity database is housed at Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), at the University of Maryland, College Park series and is available at http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm (current data for Polity Project moved to this website) . Monty Marshall has been kind in providing recent updates to the IFs project.

The Polity IV dataset provides substantial information on regime types and behavior.  Polity codes were originally assigned according to three general categories of authority patterns: executive recruitment, executive constraints, and political competition. Later, these general categories were disaggregated into six component variables. IFs has drawn primarily on their indices of democracy and autocracy.

Instructions on Importing Polity data

This section explains the methodology that is to be followed when importing Political Instability Task Force (PITF) data into Ifs. It also describes certain problems that a user might face in interpreting, understanding the data.

Source- Polity data is published by the center for systemic peace. The data is available at this website , http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscrdata.html

Types of Data-Following categories of data need to be imported into Ifs 

1. Ethnic War event-Describes the occurrence of Ethnic War in a region for a particular year. Data is binary, i.e. 1- War event, 0- No event
2. Ethnic War magnitude-Describes the Average death magnitude of the war event Range of 0-4. In case of multiple events in the same year for same region, select highest value amongst all available values.
3. Genocide-Politicide Event-Describes the occurrence of Genocide/Politicide event. Data is binary, i.e. 1- Event occurrence, 0-No event
4. Genocide-Politicide Magnitude- Describes the Average death magnitude of the event. Range of 0-4. In case of multiple events in the same year for same region, select highest value amongst all available values.
5. Regime Change event- Describes the occurrence of Regime Change event. Data is binary, i.e. 1- Event occurrence, 0-No event
6. Regime Change magnitude- Describes the Average death magnitude of the event Range of 0-4. In case of multiple events in the same year for same region, select highest value amongst all available values.
7. Revolutionary War event-Describes the occurrence of Revolutionary War event. Data is binary, i.e. 1- Event occurrence, 0-No event
8. Revolutionary War magnitude-Describes the Average death magnitude of the event Range of 0-4. In case of multiple events in the same year for same region, select highest value amongst all available values.
9. Polity Democracy-Democracy Score for a region ranging between 0-10
10. Polity Autocracy-Autocracy Score ranging between 0-10

Country List to be Used-Systemic Peace countries, Ifs country List

Series calculated automatically by Ifs- 

There are certain series which are automatically calculated by Ifs using the above data. They have been listed here for User’s convenience,

1. SFPITFInternalWarEv
2. SFPITFInternalWarEvProb
3. SFPITFInternalWarMagAvg
4. SFPITFInternalWarY1Prob
5. SFPITFConsolidatedEv
6. SFPITFConsolidatedMag

 Issues in the data and their resolution-

1. Retrospective changes-Along with the PITF updates for future years, historical PITF data is constantly updated due to quantifications completed in this year in relation to events occurring in the previous years. E.g. The Uighur revolution that occurred in China in 2009, was added to the PITF data in 2015 since quantification was completed in 2015.  Magnitudes are also changed from time to time retrospectively. (It is highly recommended that instead of just adding current year data to the Ifs file, the User perform a comparison of historical Ifs data and the PITF data to identify any retrospective changes. This can be done by first converting the PITF data into panel format by using the pivot table function in Excel, and then using a VLOOKUP to identify differences)
2. Yugoslavia Data-Data for Serbia and Kosovo are presented together under the country code of Yugoslavia in the PITF data. This data needs to be bifurcated by the user into data pertaining to Serbia and data pertaining to Kosovo. The description of the events in the PITF data can aid the user in identifying whether the event pertains to Serbia or Kosovo.