Simple Real-world Example: Data from Iversen and Soskice (2006)

In this lesson, we will apply the code from the simple toy example to a real-world data example drawn from the following published article:

Iversen, Torben, and David Soskice. 2006. “Electoral Institutions and the Politics of Coalitions: Why Some Democracies Redistribute More Than Others.” American Political Science Review 100(2): 165–81.

In this dataset, Iversen and Soskice study the variations in government redistribution across democracies. They argue that proportional representation electoral systems enable center-left governments to dominate and produce redistribution. In contrast, majoritarian systems enable center-right governments to dominate and engage in less redistribution. The following table provides the mean values of variables used in their statistical analysis for different countries.