Government Ideology - Restorative or conservative
| Quick info | |
|---|---|
| Data type | Numeric |
| Scale | Binary |
| Value labels | 1 = Yes, 0 = No |
| Technical name | cult_legitideolcr_2 |
| Category | Culture |
| Label | Government Ideology - Restorative or conservative |
| Related indicators | |
The Government Ideology has been characterized as Restorative or Conservative. Directly measuring what we call culture is difficult to do. By including the Government Ideology (Tannenberg et al. 2019) we take a measure that gives us information on the set of beliefs a national government codified and is striving for. We define culture as a shared understanding of reality. This can culminate in beliefs as to how society – and its institutions – should be structured and organized. The longer the government ideology prevails, the more it is a result of power struggles in which the majority of society in some way or the other legitimizes the state’s ideology. Turning this around, the longer the state’s ideology prevails the more impact it can have on specific cultural beliefs and values of the majority of society. V-Dem provides us with a series of binary variables representing whether a state government follows an ideology or not. This makes it possible for states to follow more than one ideology as they are not mutually exclusive. The USA in 1900, for example, is coded as being ‘Nationalist’ and ‘Restorative or conservative’; while Chile in 1965 is ‘Religious’ and ‘Socialist or communist’.
Coding rules
We take the raw data from the V-Dem project, covering a time span of 1900-2018. The following Ideologies are provided: Nationalist, Socialist or communist, Restorative or conservative, Separatist or autonomist, Religious. Coders for V-Dem were asked how they would characterize the government ideology. If they characterized it as one, it was coded as 1, if not as 0. Data itself then has been validated by summarizing a cross-coder mean of all answers, i.e. if out of three coders only one believed the government ideology to be Religious it is, in the raw data, coded as 0.333. We define a membership in one of the ideologies as valid when at least two thirds of coders for the V-Dem project agree on the characterization of the state ideology. Thus the original value has to be larger or equal to 0.666. We filled missing data for now distinct political entities in those years in which they were part of another political entity in which the data is covered. For all those cases for which this was not possible, we filled in the missing data with the last known value. By doing this, we probably overestimate rapid political change. However, we assume data for V-Dem in this variable which covers “only” a time-frame from 1900 onwards to be precise on political change especially when regarding the ideology of a state government, which, for observing this, needs to be in place and has at least as much power as to adhere to this specific ideology, to be mostly covered by V-Dem itself.
For further information see the Technical Paper: Besche-Truthe, Fabian; Seitzer, Helen; Windzio, Michael. 2020 “Cultural Spheres – Creating a dyadic dataset of cultural proximity”. SFB 1342 Technical Paper Series, 5. Bremen, SFB 1342.
Bibliographic info
Citation:
Related publications: NA (no information available)
Misc
Project manager(s): Fabian Besche-Truthe, Michael Windzio, Helen Seitzer
- Version 0.001: Initial release
Revisions: No revisions yet
Sources
Tannenberg, Marcus, Michael Bernhard, Johannes Gerschewski, Anna Lührmann, and Christian von Soest. 2019. “Regime Legitimation Strategies (RLS) 1900 to 2018.” The Varieties of Democracy Institute Working Paper Series SERIES 2019:86.
