Replication Materials
Researchers may wish to generate their own versions of the UDS, either to perform a full replication of our analysis, or to form a unified scale from a subset or superset of the twelve measures currently employed in the UDS. One can obtain the twelve measures used in the UDS from the following sources:
- Arat, Zehra F. 1991. Democracy and Human Rights in Developing Countries. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
- Bollen, Kenneth A. 2001. "Cross-National Indicators of Liberal Democracy, 1950-1990." 2nd ICPSR version. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1998. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2001. Retrieved from http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/02532.xml.
- Bowman, Kirk, Fabrice Lehoucq, and James Mahoney. 2005. "Measuring Political Democracy: Case Expertise, Data Adequacy, and Central America." Comparative Political Studies 38(8):939-970. Data at http://www.blmdemocracy.gatech.edu/.
- Cheibub, Jose Antonio, Jennifer Gandhi, and James Raymond Vreeland. 2010. "Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited." Public Choice. 143(1):67-101. Data at https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/cheibub/www/cheibub.html
- Coppedge, Michael and Wolfgang H. Reinicke. 1991. Measuring Polyarchy. In On Measuring Democracy: Its Consequences and Concomitants, ed. Alex Inkeles. New Brunswuck, NJ: Transaction pp. 47-68.
- Freedom House. 2010. "Freedom in the World." http://www.freedomhouse.org.
- Gasiorowski, Mark J. 1996. "An Overview of the Political Regime Change Dataset." Comparative Political Studies 29(4):469-483.
- Hadenius, Axel. 1992. Democracy and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Mainwaring, Scott, Daniel Brinks, and Anibal Perez Linan. 2008. "Political Regimes in Latin America, 1900-2007." http://kellogg.nd.edu/scottmainwaring/index.shtml
- Marshall, Monty G., Ted Robert Gurr, and Keith Jaggers. 2010. "Polity IV: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2009." http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm.
- Munck, Gerardo L. 2009. Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Vanhanen, Tatu. 2009. "FSD1289 Measures of Democracy 1810-2008." http://www.fsd.uta.fi/english/data/catalogue/FSD1289/meF1289e.html.
We are developing an open source R library containing data and functions that will allow researchers to easily replicate the analyses presented in our article and extend those analyses in various ways. We will make this library available here eventually. If you have access to a machine with a C++ compiler and are comfortable building R packages that include C/C++ extensions from source, you may contact the authors to obtain an undocumented pre-release version of the package.