Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Research Data

If you set your students to do some research, the CIA World Factbook is a good start. Gapminder is in many ways even better. Original sources can be found on my book's website.

And now, there's V-Dem.

Look for correlations in the Factbook, find historical trends and correlations with Gapminder, explore official and journalistic data from original sources. And, define democracy with V-Dem.

Open data and (15 million!) new measures of democracy

There is no consensus on the definition of democracy and how to measure it. The understanding of what a democracy really is varies across countries and regions. This motivates the V-Dem approach not to offer one standard definition of the concept but instead to distinguish among five principles different versions of democracy: Electoral, Liberal, Participatory, Deliberative, and Egalitarian democracy…

V-Dem differs from previous datasets by distinguishing among different principles of democracy (as discussed) and offering about 350 unique democracy indicators, 34 indices of various aspects of democracy such as freedom of association, and five main democracy indices for Electoral, Liberal, Participatory, Deliberative, and Egalitarian democracy. These all cover 173 countries, measured annually from 1900 to 2012…

Scholars, students, media, policy analysts, practitioners, and others interested in the status of democracy in the world can visit our website, where they can use the online analysis tools to generate graphs showing a country’s regime trajectory and comparisons with other country…

Teaching Comparative blog entries are indexed. Use the search box to look for country names or concept labels attached to each entry.

What You Need to Know 7th edition is ready to help.

Order the book HERE
Amazon's customers gave this book a 4-star rating.

Just The Facts! 2nd edition is a concise guide to concepts, terminology, and examples that will appear on May's exam.

Just The Facts! is available. Order HERE.

Amazon's customers gave this book a 5-star rating.

The Comparative Government and Politics Review Checklist.

Two pages summarizing the course requirements to help you review and study for the final and for the big exam in May. . It contains a description of comparative methods, a list of commonly used theories, a list of vital concepts, thumbnail descriptions of the AP6, and a description of the AP exam format. $2.00. Order HERE.