Corrections and Refinements to the Database of Political Institutions’ yrcurnt Election Timing Variable

By Christopher Gandrud

The yrcurnt variable in the Database of Political Institutions (Beck et al. 2001, updated in 2013)[1]–DPI–is a regularly used measure of government election timing. For example, Alt, Lassen, and Wehner (2014) use the variable in their recent study of fiscal gimmickry in Europe. They find that fiscal gimmickry–straying from accepted accounting standards–is more common directly before elections (and in countries with weak fiscal transparency).

Because the DPI’s yrcurnt variable is so regularly turned to for testing how election timing affects governments’ choices, it is especially important that it be reliable and valid. However, the variable in the current (2013) DPI release has a number of issues that this note aims to correct.[2]

Variable definition

Before looking at problems in the yrcurnt variable, let’s reiterate how the variable is defined. The DPI Codebook[3] (p. 4) defines the yrcurnt variable as the years left in a country’s chief executive’s current term such that:

“a ‘0’ is scored in an election year, and n-1 in the year after an election, where n is the length of the term. In countries where early elections can be called, YRCURNT is set to the de jure term limit or schedule of elections, but resets in the case of early elections.”

Issues

The original variable has a number of issues that make it problematic for studying how election timing impacts government policymaking. The first set of concerns are clearly errors that make the variable a less reliable measure of the concept defined above. These errors can be straightforwardly corrected. The second set of concerns have to do with issues that bring into question the variable’s validity in a number of cases for studying how election timing shapes policymaking. I argue that simple refinements can be made to improve the variable’s validity in these cases.

In this note I focus on the EU-28 countries (all 28 current European Union member states). Problems with the variable may exist for a wider range of countries. Given the depth of problems with the yrcurnt variable discussed here, it would certainly be worthwhile in future work to reevaluate the variable for the full breadth of countries covered by the DPI.

I used the European Election Database[4] to find correct election years. This information was cross-checked and supplemented with individual country-election articles on Wikipedia.[5]

Errors

There are many instances in the DPI where election years are not recorded as 0. In other cases non-election years were mis-coded as 0. In some cases incorrect statutory election timing was also given. The following table lists these errors:

Refinements

For a number of countries the elections recorded are for largely figurehead presidents. This can affect both when elections are recorded and how many years are given until the next election as figurehead presidents often have longer terms than parliaments. In these cases the current yrcurnt variable is not a valid measure of government election timing.

Some countries are less clear-cut because they have semi-presidential systems. Nonetheless, in a number of these cases the prime minister is the leader of the government and largely sets the domestic policy agenda. These powers are most relevant for studying topics such as public budgeting.

The following refinements should be made to create a more valid indicator for research on how election timing affects policymaking:

Available updated data

In sum, of the EU-28 countries there are clear errors for 14 countries’ election timing in the DPI yrcurnt variable. There are a further four countries where a more valid measure of election timing could be created by focusing on parliamentary rather than presidential elections.

A data set that implements these corrections and refinements for the EU-28 countries can be found on GitHub.[6] The data (including both the original and corrected versions of the variable) can be downloaded directly into R using the repmis package (Gandrud 2015) with the following code:

yrcurnt_corrected 

This file also has updated election timing data through 2013.

References

Alt, James, David Dreyer Lassen, and Joachim Wehner. 2014. “It Isn’t Just About Greece: Domestic Politics, Transparency and Fiscal Gimmickry in Europe.” British Journal of Political Science 44 (04): 707–16.

Beck, Thorsten, George Clarke, Alberto Groff, Philip Keefer, and Patrick Walsh. 2001. “New Tools in Comparative Political Economy: The Database of Political Institutions.” World Bank Economic Review 15 (1): 165–76.

Gandrud, Christopher. 2015. repmis: Miscellaneous Tools for Reproducible Research with R. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/repmis/.

Notes

1. See: http://go.worldbank.org/2EAGGLRZ40. Accessed February 2015. All corrections and refinements discussed here refer to this version of the database.
2. Note that Alt, Lassen, and Wehner’s (2014) substantive findings hold up when using the correct data presented here, though the estimated magnitudes of the effects are reduced. See the replication repository for more details: https://github.com/christophergandrud/Alt_et_al_2014_Replication.
3. The DPI Codebook can be found at: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRES/Resources/469232-1107449512766/DPI2012_Codebook2.pdf. Accessed February 2015.
4. See http://www.nsd.uib.no/european_election_database/country/. Accessed February 2015.
5. See https://www.wikipedia.org/. Accessed September 2014 and February 2015.
6. See https://github.com/christophergandrud/yrcurnt_corrected/tree/master/data.