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Welcome to WeSISpedia, the collaborative codebook accompanying WeSIS -- the Welfare State Information System. The aim of WeSIS is to provide the most comprehensive database on social policies throughout the world since 1880. WeSIS includes monadic data on social policies and (explanatory) variables capturing domestic conditions like policy legacies, economic, financial and political factors, information about the social structure, culture, and geography. Reflecting different forms of interdependencies and relations among states, WeSIS further includes dyadic data about (flows of) communication, political institutional linkages, economic relations, migration, colonial dependencies, and violent conflicts.
Every indicator is documented here in WeSISpedia, and the information is parsed and displayed in WeSIS. Indicator tables (see the corresponding boxes below) provide basic information about all indicators of each policy field or topic, and further link to dedicated indicator pages where each indicator is documented in a structured and detailed manner. Alongside common coding rules and harmonized country and IO codes, WeSISpedia provides useful information when preparing data for WeSIS, and records additional aspects affecting the data collection and documentation.
WeSIS and WeSISpedia are key research data components of the Collaborative Research Center 1342 on Global Dynamics of Social Policy funded by the German Research Foundation.
If you are filling an indicator page, please follow the coding rules and the instructions of either the indicator template or the indicator form for creating new pages.
If you are preparing a file to upload in WeSIS, please follow the instructions of the file formats and make sure you are using the correct country and IO names and codes. The file upload guide is work in progress.
Social policies |
National attributes |
Global linkages |
Data preparation |
Data documentation |
Further resources |
