The Neo-Alexandrians: A Review Essay on Data Handbooks in Political Science

Abstract

Four major new compilations of macropolitical data are compared and evaluated. Each summarizes a large-scale research effort to code or to collect data suitable for theoretically relevant, cross-national comparisons. As a group the new handbooks incorporate many improvements and innovations on earlier handbooks, which concentrated mainly on cross-sectional, aggregate data or simplistically coded judgments about nation-states. About a third of their measures consist of “made” data, derived by coding journalistic and historical sources. All provide some measures for cross-time comparisons; one is devoted exclusively to time-series data. Many of their measures denote properties of internal and international conflict and of international transactions. All but one are painfully self-conscious about problems of reliability and comparability of data. One criticism is the reliance of several of the handbooks on “counts” of conflict events rather than assessment of more theoretically relevant properties of conflict. A second is the paucity of indicators of inequality and, more generally, of measures which give a “view from the bottom” of political systems.