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.
Contents
Data collection
Date Time: Dates, e.g. the introduction of laws, election dates etc. must be entered as YYYY.MM.DD.
For date times the following rules apply in descending order:
- Whenever possible, add the complete date.
- If an event (like an election) took place on more than one day enter the first day of the period.
- If the day is unknown, enter YYYY.MM. While importing data to WeSIS an internal flag will be set that the day is unknown.
- If evn the month is unknown, just enter YYYY. Internally, a flag will be set that both the day and month are unknown.
- 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:
- Correlates of War (COW) country codes are preferred over V-Dem and ISO codes.
- Whenever possible, data should be collected for each entity separately.
- 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 whole name is 32 characters, i.e. the full name including the topic and any underscore.
| Topic | Abbreviation |
|---|---|
| Old age and survivors | old |
| Labour and labour market | labor |
| Health and long-term care | health |
| Education and training | edu |
| Family policies | fam |
| Gender aspects | gend |
| Topic | Abbreviation |
|---|---|
| Policy legacies | polleg |
| Economic and financial factors | econnat |
| Political factors | polnat |
| Social structure | socstr |
| Culture | cult |
| Geography | geo |
| 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.
