Political Constraints III

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Metric
Value labels	Not applicable
Technical name	polnat_polity_polconiii_polcon
Category	Political factors
Label	Index of political constraints (POLCON III)
Related indicators	Political Constraints V

Henisz' measures of political constraints (POLCON) capture the "feasibility of change", i.e. the "the extent to which a change in the preferences of any one actor may lead to a change in government policy" (Henisz 2002, 363). It ranges from 0 to 1 with higher values indicating more constraints. The POLCON III index takes three branches (executive, lower and upper legislative chambers) into account.

Coding rules

Henisz starts out from identifying the number of independent government branches, assuming policy preferences "independently and identically drawn from a uniform, unidimensional policy space" (Henisz 2002, 363) and taking the extent of partisan alignments across the branches into account. For a detailed description of the index construction see Henisz 2002, 380-389 (Appendix). In contrast to his POLCON V measure which also considers the judiciary and sub-federal entities, the POLCON III index only takes three government branches (executive, lower and upper legislative chambers) into account.

Bibliographic info

Citation: Henisz, Witold J. 2002. "The Institutional Environment for Infrastructure Investment." Industrial and Corporate Change 11 (2): 355-389. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/11.2.355

Related publications:

• Henisz, Witold J. 2000. "The Institutional Environment for Economic Growth." Economics and Politics 12 (1): 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0343.00066
• Henisz, Witold J. 2005. "POLCON_2005 Codebook". https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/CODEBOOK_2005.pdf

Misc

Project manager(s): Nils Düpont (INF), Paul Bederke

Data release:

• Version 0.001: Initial release
• Version 0.002: Updated with data from POLCON 2022 Data Release

Revisions: The POLCON 2022 Data Release includes new indicators namely "POLCONV_VDEM" and "POLCONIII_VDEM". Compared to "polconv" and "polconiii" (which are included in v0.001), they contain longer time-series and were used for v0.002. While data for both indicators matches for most countries there are few discrepancies between the POLCON measures, and consequently between both versions in WeSIS. In addition, few changes were applied to the country codes originally provided in POLCON to better reflect the "related unit coding" in WeSIS.

Sources

• Henisz, Witold J. 2017. "The Political Constraint Index (POLCON) Dataset. 2017 Data Release." https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/heniszpolcon/polcondataset/
• Henisz, Witold J. 2022. "The Political Constraint Index (POLCON) Dataset. 2022 Data Release." https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/heniszpolcon/polcondataset/