Country codes

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This page lists all "countries" included in WeSIS and their numeric codes. Defining a country, political unit or a state member of the international system is challenging. In order to ensure cross-comparability to other major data collections in the social sciences, we rely on the coding by the Corrrelates of War project (COW).

Identifying entities

Contemporary states existent in 2016 form the basis of this list. COW applies a minimum definition for actors to qualify as a state member of the international system since 1816 (for a detailed discussion and refinements see COW's "State System Membership List, v2016"):

  • Prior to 1920, the entity must have population greater than 500,000 and have had diplomatic missions at or above the rank of charge d’affaires with Britain and France.
  • After 1920, the entity must be a member of the United Nations or League of Nations, or have a population greater than 500,000 and receive diplomatic missions from two major powers.

In addition, territorial and/or administrative changes are tracked and related entities are included for WeSIS based on COW's "Colonial Contiguity Data", more specifically the "Entities" list (included in the PDF file).

Disclaimer: The inclusion of an entity in WeSIS is based on scientific and analytical grounds. This precludes any judgments about which territories qualify as countries. For this reason, recognizing entities in WeSIS should not be interpreted as judgments about sovereign claims to disputed territories.

Relation types

The following types of relationship are coded from COW's "Entity" list:

  1. (Became) part of
  2. (Became) possession of
  3. (Became) colony of
  4. Occupied by
  5. (Became) protectorate
  6. Mandated to
  7. Leased to
  8. (Became) neutral or demilitarized

Reading the table

The entity list below uses index notation to describe the relation, the time frame and type within a row.

Using Cuba as an example, it can be read as follows:

cow_code country_name independence related_list relation_year relation_type
40 Cuba [(1902, 1906), (1909, 9999)] [230, 2, 2] [(1816, 1898), (1898, 1902), (1906, 1909)] [3, 4, 4]
  • Contemporary Cuba has the numeric COW code 40
  • It was independent from 1902 to 1906 and 1909 until today (9999)
  • Throughout time, it had three relations:
    • [1] From 1816 to 1898, it was a "colony of" (relation_type: 3) Spain (COW code in related_list: 230)
    • [2] From 1898 to 1902, it was "occupied by" (relation_type: 4) United States of America (COW code in related_list: 2)
    • [3] From 1906 to 1909, it was "occupied by" (relation_type: 4) United States of America (COW code in related_list: 2)

WeSIS recognizes data for the entire period. Make sure that data for years outside independence is actually attributable to the focal entity, though.

The table contains two exceptional notations:

  • [(0, 0)] means the entity existed - so data may be attributable - but never was independent.
  • [(9999)] means "until today".

Entity codes

The table lists all entities that WeSIS recognizes. It gives information about the years when an entity was or is independent. In addition, it records related entities, the type of relation and corresponding time frames. The column "pop_over_500k" is a dummy indicating whether the contemporary entity has a population over 500.000 (=1), or not (=0) in 2016 (Source: Worldbank 2019). This threshold is mentioned in the CRC's grant proposal and gives guidance in setting priorities for collecting data. In case of doubt, please talk to your PIs. The columns "alt_names" and "remark" give name changes and note any deviance from COW. Finally, the table includes links to Wikipedia for more information about an entity's history. This way, the list shall ease finding the proper numeric COW code when coding data for a certain entity and point in time.

Please use the search bar to the right to filter the table when looking for specific entity codes, "country names" or related entities. See above for an example of "reading" a row.


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Amendments and limitations

In general, the temporal domain of COW starts in 1816. Yet, WeSIS does not recognize entities beyond the time frame defined by the earliest or latest year in the colums "independence" and "relation_year". In some cases, changes have been made with respect to the start or end year of independence or a relation. These are documented in the column "remark". Most notable are deviances when a country not yet gained full independence regarding foreign policy - a defining criterion for COW - but had autonomy or self-government over domestic policies. As social policies fall into this realm, time frames may have been adjusted.

Based on personal exchange with COW coordinators, the following entities have been changed manually:

  • Name change for 345 from "Yugoslavia" to "Serbia"

The rationale is as follows: The country code 345 applies to Serbia before it becomes the core of Yugoslavia, which retains 345. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia assumes the country code 345, which it has before it becomes the core of Yugoslavia. This is consistent with what COW has for Russia (365). Russia is the core of the Soviet Union. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, COW has the same country code for Russia that exists for Russia before it becomes the core of the Soviet Union. The name change is already scheduled for COW's next release.

Relation to other schemes

There are many other country coding schemes out there like ISO 3166-1 or the scheme applied by the "Varieties of Democracy" Project (V-Dem) - each with a different scope regarding time and entities, though. V-Dem's country codes in particular aim at a consistent time series whereas COW usually treats entities as "fixed" or "separated". For example, COW assigns three codes to Korea, North Korea and South Korea while V-Dem subsumes Korea and South Korea under one code. This makes it cumbersome though, when trying to disaggregate data if desirable. For this reason, data for WeSIS is collected for each entity separately applying COW codes.

However, as COW has become a standard on its own, V-Dem includes COW codes as well making it easy to merge data. Likewise, packages like countrycode for R or kountry for Stata provide valuable tools to convert from and to COW codes if needed.

Misc

Contributors: Bastian Becker, Fabian Besche, Nils Düpont, and Heiner Fechner

Revisions:

  • CRC internal release on July 16, 2018‎
  • Static list extended by related entities and replaced as searchable data.table on February 20, 2019
  • Dummy "pop.over.500k" added on February 23, 2019
  • List replaced with new version containing more detailed description of types of relationship on February 21, 2020
  • Old list archived on February 21, 2020
  • Ten entities added that had relations but were missing on March 05, 2020

Sources

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