comparative-politics

What problem does it solve?

It solves the problem of conducting rigorous comparative political analysis by unifying major regime and governance datasets into a clean country-year panel suitable for statistical testing and interpretation.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Build a harmonized country-year panel by merging Quality of Government (QoG), Polity 5 regime scores, and (optionally) Freedom House ratings into one analysis-ready dataset.
• Classify and track regime types (autocracy, hybrid/anocracy, democracy) using Polity 5 thresholds and identify special Polity codes that require cleaning.
• Estimate and compare panel models using fixed-effects panel OLS with clustered standard errors, plus a Hausman-based approach to decide between FE and RE.
• Detect democratic backsliding via rolling-window declines in Polity scores and summarize episode severity.
• Support multilevel analytical framing where countries are nested within broader regions, enabling richer comparative interpretation.

Quick Start

Use the comparative-politics skill to merge QoG, Polity 5, and Freedom House into a single country-year panel, then run a country and year fixed-effects model where log GDP per capita predicts a governance outcome like control of corruption.