Coding rules

In order to ensure consistency for the data in WeSIS as well as the documentation in WeSISpedia, several coding rules and documentation standards have been established.

Data collection

Date Time: Dates, e.g. the introduction of laws, election dates etc. shall be entered as YYYY.MM.DD.

For date times the following rules apply in descending order:

1. Whenever possible, add the complete date.
2. If an event (like an election) took place on more than one day enter the first day of the period.
3. If the day is unknown, enter the last day of the month and add a new column or field "day_na" = 1 (i.e. "Unknown" = TRUE). If an event indeed occured at the last of the month, you may add a column or field "day_na" = 0 (i.e. "Unknown" = FALSE) for making it explicit.
4. If the month is unknown, enter the last month of the year and add a new column or field "month_na" = 1. (i.e. "Unknown" = TRUE). If an event indeed occured at the last of the year, you may add a column or field "month_na" = 0 (i.e. "Unknown" = FALSE) for making it explicit.
5. The default reference date for all yearly data is December 31, if not explicitly stated otherwise on the indicator page.

Country codes: Several rules apply when assigning country codes to the data:

1. Correlates of War (COW) country codes are preferred over V-Dem and ISO codes.
2. Whenever possible, data should be collected for each entity separately.
3. Whenever possible, all country codes should be added to ensure comparability.

Note: V-Dem country codes aim at providing a consistent time series for an entity (e.g. Korea is subsumed under South Korea). This way, disassociating data for both entities becomes cumbersome if they should be analyzed separately. Instead, WeSIS' aim is to provide data as "disaggregated" as possible allowing for a flexible case selection and aggregation afterwards.

Technical variable names: Within WeSIS every indicator has a technical name. The topics define the initial abbreviation followed by an underscore. Add a meaningful suffix afterwards using underscores, e.g. polnat_election_date (not polnat_electiondate) for an indicator capturing the election date.

Note: The maximum length for the name is 32 characters, i.e. the full name including the topic and any underscore.

Social policies (Y)

Topic	Abbreviation
Old age and survivors	old
Labour and labour market	labor
Health and long-term care	health
Education and training	edu
Family policies	family
Gender aspects	gend

Domestic conditions (X1)

Topic	Abbreviation
Policy legacies	polleg
Economic and financial factors	econnat
Political factors	polnat
Social structure	socstr
Culture	cult
Geography	geo

Interdependencies and relations (X2)

Topic	Abbreviation
Communication	comm
Political institutional linkages	polrel
Economic relations	econrel
Migration	migra
Violent conflicts	confl

Spelling

BE or AE: In WeSISpedia American English shall be used.

Capitalization: Indicator names (and hence page titles) shall not be capitalized. For general guidelines please refer to Wikipedia's Manual of Style as well.

Citation

WeSISpedia applies the citation style of the American Political Science Review in line with the American Political Science Association's official style guide. The style uses the author-date system for in-text citations. It is used in the following format: (Author Year, Pages). There is no comma between the author and the year whereas mass citations are separated with a semicolon.

The citation style is readily available as a template in Citavi and RefWorks and can be downloaded for Zotero, EndNote or Mendeley.

Below you will find some examples for referencing common types of publication. Please refer to the APSA Style Guide for further information:

• Edited Volumes: Castles, Francis G., Stephan Leibfried, Jane Lewis, Herbert Obinger, and Christopher Pierson, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Monograph: Esping-Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Report (Monograph): OECD. 2006. Taxing Wages 2004/2005. Special Feature: Part-Time Work and Taxing Wages. Paris: OECD Publishing.
• Journal Article: Schmitt, Carina. 2014. "The Diffusion of Privatization in Europe: Political Affinity or Economic Competition?" Public Administration 92 (3): 615-635.
• Working Paper: Schmitt, Carina, and Herbert Obinger. 2012. Policy Diffusion and Social Rights in Advanced Democracies 1960-2000. Bremen: Zentrum für Sozialpolitik. ZeS-Working Paper, 02/2012.