Charles Lewis Taylor

Integrated Data for Events Analysis (IDEA): An Event Typology for Automated Events Data Development

This article outlines the basic parameters and current status of the Integrated Data for Event Analysis (IDEA) project. IDEA provides a comprehensive events framework for the analysis of international interactions by supplementing the event forms from all earlier projects with new event forms needed to monitor contemporary trends in civil and interstate politics. It uses a more flexible multi-leveled event and actor/target hierarchy that can be expanded to incorporate new event forms and actors/targets, and adds dimensions that can be employed to construct indicators for early warning and assessing conflict escalation. IDEA is currently being used in the automatedcoding of news reports (Reuters Business Briefs) and, in collaboration withother projects, in the analysis of field reports. The article summarizes the conceptual framework being used in this data development effort, its major variables, and its geographic and temporal coverage.

Mapping Mass Political Conflict and Civil Society

Mass political conflict is typically examined in terms of violence and in isolation from routine civil interactions. The authors argue that mass conflict is multidimensional and that violence should be treated as an outcome of conflict, as well as a form of action. They define three dimensions of conflict—contentiousness, coerciveness, and change goals—and indices of the civil society that are central to mapping global trends in mass conflict. A strategy for mapping mass conflict and civil interactions using the PANDA protocol to generate highly reliable event data is outlined, and these indices are used to trace two democratic transitions (in Poland and South Korea), a conflict crisis that was repressed (China), and a conflict escalation that flared into a civil war (the former Yugoslavia). Automation has major advantages over human coding in terms of transparency, integration with existing event data series, real-time availability, and long-term maintenance costs. It also opens new ways of thinking about event data and the assessment of reliability.

Indicators of political development

Summary Development implies goals and the positing of goals requires values. Economists have generally agreed that the increase of wealth (or perhaps welfare) is the proper object of economic development. Political scientists, probably happily, have no similar agreement in regard to the appropriate goal for political development. Moreover, it is doubtful that the various aspects of political change are located along a single continuum. This is an empirical question but investigation ought to begin at least with provision for an n‐dimensional space. Finally, political scientists should concentrate on political change that has too often been neglected in favour of economic and purely social change.

Computer Routines for Arraying Aggregate Data

In recent years, political and social scientists have greatly expanded their data-collecting activities and have devoted considerable attention to various problems of measuring political and social concepts embedded in theoretical structures. One type of data which has been used more and more is commonly termed aggregate data. In general, this refers to characteristics of various types of political and social units and groups. In the fields of comparative and international politics, such factors as the absolute or per capita amount of money spent by a country on defense and various summary measures of political events such as elections, votes per political party, riots, and assassinations, are examples of aggregate statistics. One work in this area was the first edition of the World Handbook of Social and Political Indicators (Russett et al., 1964). The increased

The 1970 APSA Elections

The annual election for officers and members of the Council of the American Political Science Association took place between November 2 and 23, 1970, with results reported in the Winter, 1971, issue of this journal. Voting was for one President-elect, three Vice Presidents, one Secretary, one Treasurer and eight members of the Council. There were two candidates each for Presidentelect, Secretary and Treasurer, five for Vice President and sixteen for Council. These candidates were nominated and supported by a variety of groups and three of these groups-The American Political Science Association nominating committee, the Ad Hoc Committee and the Caucus for a New Political Science-fielded complete or virtually complete slates.

Converting monetary units

Current research on the conversion of monetary units has ramifications for the development of data on GDP/GNP and other variables that consist of monetary units. Recent research is described that has yielded insights into the distortions inherent in exchange rate conversion of monetary units to a single currency and led to the development of an alternative method of conversion based on extensive price comparisons. UN and World Bank researchers have produced estimates based on this method for 124 countries for the 1950–80 period. Unfortunately, their method depends on extensive price information and cannot be extended to the pre‐1950 period. Therefore, it is necessary to rely on exchange rate converted figures for the 1816–1985 series and the price comparison‐based estimates will provide a valuable, if limited, supplemental series.