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The Level of Democracy during Interregnum Periods: Recoding the polity2 Score

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Thomas Plümper  and
Eric Neumayer
Thomas Plümper*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK, and Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Hausmanns gate 7, NO-0186 Oslo, Norway
Eric Neumayer
Affiliation:
Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, London WC2A 2AE, UK, and Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Hausmanns gate 7, NO-0186 Oslo, Norway. e-mail: e.neumayer@lse.ac.uk
*
e-mail: tpluem@essex.ac.uk (corresponding author)
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Abstract

The polity2 variable from the Polity IV project is the most popular measure of a country's political regime. This article contends that the coding rules employed to create a polity2 score during years of so-called interregnum and affected transitions produce a measure of democracy that lacks face validity. Using both single and multiple imputation methods, we construct and evaluate several variables that offer alternative measures to polity2 during such periods. We recommend that scholars using polity2 test whether their results are robust to using our alternatives and using multiple imputation techniques instead. Where robustness cannot be established, scholars need to theoretically justify the choice of either polity2 or one of the alternatives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Spring 2010 , pp. 206 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: Equal authorship. We thank three anonymous referees, the editors as well as Kristian S. Gleditsch, Nils Petter Gleditsch, Håvard Strand, and Michael D. Ward for helpful comments. The data for the replication analyses as well as our alternative polity variables will be made available for download from http://personal.lse.ac.uk/neumayer or http://www.polsci.org/pluemper/.

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