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Loads country-year leader data from one of two datasets included with the package. Each row in the output represents one country-year, with the leader who held power at the end of the year. When multiple leaders served in the same year (i.e., a leadership transition occurred), the leader with the latest start date is retained.

Usage

load_leader_data(
  start_year = 1945,
  end_year = 2015,
  dataset = c("archigos", "reign"),
  coding_system = c("cow", "gw")
)

Source

Archigos: Goemans, H.E., Gleditsch, K.S., & Chiozza, G. (2009). Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders. Journal of Peace Research, 46(2), 269–283. https://web.archive.org/web/20241206095059/http://ksgleditsch.com/archigos.html

REIGN: Bell, C. (2021). REIGN: Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance Dataset. One Earth Future Foundation. https://oefdatascience.github.io/REIGN.github.io/

Arguments

start_year

Integer. First year to include.

end_year

Integer. Last year to include.

dataset

Character. Dataset to load:

"archigos"

Archigos 4.1 (Goemans, Gleditsch & Chiozza). Leader spells with entry/exit mode coding. Coverage: 1875–2015.

"reign"

REIGN Leader List (Bell 2021). Leader spells with military background coding. Coverage: 1921–2021.

coding_system

Character. Country coding system: "cow" or "gw".

Value

A country-year data frame. Columns differ by dataset:

archigos: cow/gw, year, leader, entry, exit, irregular_entry, irregular_exit, female_leader, yrborn, posttenurefate, leader_tenure.

reign: cow/gw, year, leader, female_leader, military_bg, birthyear, leader_tenure.

References

Goemans, H. E., Gleditsch, K. S., & Chiozza, G. (2009). Introducing Archigos: A dataset of political leaders. Journal of Peace Research, 46(2), 269-283.

Bell, C., Besaw, C., & Frank, M. (2021). The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance (REIGN) Dataset.

Examples

arch <- load_leader_data(1990, 2010, dataset = "archigos", coding_system = "cow")

reign <- load_leader_data(1990, 2010, dataset = "reign", coding_system = "gw")