1999 Data Set Award

APSA Comparative Politics Section



Co-Recipient: Michael J. Coppedge Title: Data Sets on Polyarchy and on Latin American Political Parties

Co-Recipients: Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba Title: Civic Culture Data Set



The committee considered a number of outstanding nominees, all of whom should be promising candidates for the award in future years. Each of the nominees has made a significant contribution to the data infrastructure of the field. However, in most of the cases, work remains to be done or the data are not yet easily accessible to the political science community.



In general, the committee thinks only one award should be made on an annual basis. But in this first year we would like to recognize two exemplary efforts, one new and one old, in collecting and disseminating data. Together, they represent the values we would like to promote with this prize.



First, we are awarding the prize to Michael Coppedge, of the University of Notre Dame, for his role in creating and making publicly available two data sets, on Polyarchy and on Latin American Political Parties. The Polyarchy data set was originally collected in collaboration with Wolfgang H. Reinicke, and the committee likewise acknowledges his contribution. This data set shows a respect for craftsmanship and method that we see too infrequently. Coppedge and Reinicke began with data from the Gastil (Freedom House) collection; checked the reliability of the measures by comparing the data to other sources and with new data generated by an independent coder; scaled some of the Gastil measures to create a new index; and used this index to establish whether the two dimensions suggested by Robert Dahl's original formulation of the concept of polyarchy are really distinct. They document these steps in an article in Studies in Comparative International Development (Spring 1990), and Coppedge has made the data available on his own website: http://www.nd.edu:80/~mcoppedg/crd



Coppedge's other data set, on Latin American Political Parties, shows similar craftsmanship. These data provide systematic information on numbers of political parties over time and their ideological orientation, as well as measures of background variables. A discussion of methods and full documentation appear on the Coppedge website, along with the data set itself.



Although these data sets do not rest on original fieldwork, they are valuable to the profession and they represent a significant investment that benefits others. We hope that future efforts by other scholars will match Coppedge's high standards of careful data preparation and public accessibility.



We also want to award the prize to an older, celebrated data set, The Civic Culture. The Civic Culture data set was one of the first efforts to facilitate cross-national comparison of political attitudes and behavior. It continues to represent much of what we want this prize to inspire. It is based on original field research, which we hope to encourage. It responds to an important question in comparative politics. It is publicly accessible, on deposit with ICPSR. Above all, over the years its authors have shown themselves willing to engage in a generous and spirited discussion of the theory, the methods, the data, and the shortcomings. Others have learned from these exchanges.



Data Set Award Committee, 1998-99 Jennifer Widner, Chair Barry Ames Peter Lange