Yet again, I have conjured up an (academically) unusual dataset on democracy! This time it’s the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a weird little gem.  The dataset is the basis for a paper the Economist publishes every two years.  Because of this biannuality, there is data estimating the “... [Read more...]

So the other day’s experiment with the Failed States Index and the Polity Data didn’t yield the linear trend I had originally expected.  After all, the two measure fundamentally distinct things.  But perhaps there’s another dataset which will match linearly.  The same people who made polity also ... [Read more...]

So, I decided to sit down and have a little fun with that Failed States Index data I put together. To start, I expect that the dataset will be pretty linearly correlated with the polity IV data. This makes sense–true democracies aren’t failed states, and failed states tend ... [Read more...]

Data must be selected carefully.  The predictive usefulness of the model is grossly diminished if outliers taint the available data.  Figure 1, for instance, shows the Defense spending (as a fraction of the national budget) between 1948 and 1968. Note how the trend curve (as defined by our linear difference model from the ... [Read more...]