Merge V-Dem with UCDP

[Kristoffer Eikner]

Hi!

I am currently working on my bachelors-thesis, where I will measure the impact of voilent conflict in countries after 1945 on democratic development.

I will be using conflict-data from UCDP, and polyarchi-index from V-Dem. I have tried merging the two datasets, but unfortunately there are no matching variables.

Since I have no experience with STATA (only SPSS), I am completely lost at this point. Does any of you have experience with these two data sets, and maybe give me a hand?

Thank you very much!


Kristoffer

[Clyde Schechter]

Well, it is not possible to merge data sets that have no matching variables, except perhaps doing random pairups between observations in the two data sets.

I imagine what you mean is that the variables you would normally want to use as the -merge- key, such as one naming the country and the other giving the year are either named differently in the data sets, or are coded in different ways in the two data sets (e.g. one says USA and the other says United States). Generically, the solution is to clean both data sets to create conforming variables. For specific advice, you need to show examples from the two data sets. It is crucial that you do this by using the -dataex- command so that we get all the necessary metadata as well.

If you are running version 15.1 or a fully updated version 14.2, -dataex- is already part of your official Stata installation. If not, run -ssc install dataex- to get it. Either way, run -help dataex- to read the simple instructions for using it. -dataex- will save you time; it is easier and quicker than typing out tables. It includes complete information about aspects of the data that are often critical to answering your question but cannot be seen from tabular displays or screenshots. It also makes it possible for those who want to help you to create a faithful representation of your example to try out their code, which in turn makes it more likely that their answer will actually work in your data.



When asking for help with code, always show example data. When showing example data, always use -dataex-.