Version Notes

Here you can find version update notes for the base data underlying REIGN, ELVI and CoupCast. Notes go back to February 2019 and cover fixes, major changes, and data updates. For access to past version of any of our data products, please contact Matthew Frank (mfrank@oneearthfuture.org) with your request.

VERSION UPDATE NOTES

August 3, 2021

• Added birth years for the following leaders: Guillermo Lasso, Francois Ngeze
• Changed St. Lucian election date from deadline of October 12 to date the election was held this month (July 26)

July 6, 2021

• Removed Gambia referendum for June 2021. Referendum would have been held had the National Assembly passed the Constitution Promulgation Bill but that bill did not meet the 3/4 threshold needed to advance it to a referendum.
• Updated Haiti’s constitutional referendum. Included announcement date on Jan 7 when Provisional Electoral Council announced initial date in April as well as the delay that was announced on June 8 which has indefinitely delayed the referendum from its June 27 date.
• Changed upcoming St. Lucian election date to October 12.
• Added Nepal’s November elections.
• Corrected date of Mexican midterm elections to June 6 in ELVI.
• Added missing Kyrgyz Republic constitutional referendum on April 11.
• Altered date of Kyrgyz Republic’s parliamentary elections to 12/31/2021 for this year to reflect most recent announcment from President Sadyr Japarov that elections would be held sometime in the autumn.
• Added to ELVI missing Algerian presidential election in December 2019 and legislative elections in June 2021.

June 3, 2021

• Fixed start date (sdate and smonth) of Seychellois leader France-Albert Rene (leadid = cb-591-2). sdate and smonth values were mixed up.
• Fixed start date (sdate and smonth) of Kuwaiti Emir Nawaf Al-Sabah (leadid = ctb-690-1).
• Fixed end month of Bhutan PM Lyonpo Jigme Thinley (leadid = A3.0-192)
• Fixed start month of Samoan PM Tamasese Lealofi IV (leadid = kb-800-4)
• Fixed incorrect election dates for the following countries: Syria, Iraq, Mongolia and Zambia

May 4, 2021

• Forecasts made using updated World Bank and IMF indicators for GDP, population and infant mortality rate.
• Changed Chad’s regime type of military provisional following institution of military transitional council
• Added Mali’s October 31 constitutional referendum to ELVI forecast list

April 5, 2021

• Fixed previously incorrect dates for elections in the following countries: Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Haiti, Ethiopia
• Added elections that were previously missing for the following countries: Micronesia, Armenia, Libya
• Added cancelled/voided status to previously anticipated election events in Nepal. Due to institutional reasons, snap elections were declared null and void.
• Changed Libya’s regime type from Warlordism to Civilian Provisional. This was done in conjunction with assumption of Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh to office under the new Government of National Accord. Libya is set to hold elections in December and successful elections will likely result in full democracy status.

February 8, 2021

• Fixed a bug regarding the dropping of Warlordism from the regime type variable. Yemen and Libya briefly had no recorded regime type due to this bug.
• Both the REIGN data and regimes list are now fixed as of February 8.

February 2, 2021

• Fixed election announcement and date for Kosovo snap election.
• Added new successful coup event in the following countries: Myanmar (February 2021)
• Regime type changes for the following countries: Myanmar (to military junta), Kyrgyz Republic (to presidential)
• Nicaragua’s regime type has retroactively been changed to party-personal starting in December 2020. This was done in light of new legislation that gives the presidency unilateral power to ban/disqualify parties and individuals from elections.

January 5, 2021

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s December 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Audited and updated inter-state conflict statuses for end of 2020.
• Added new 2019 numbers from UCDP’s Georeferenced Event Dataset for political violence indicator forecast.
• Fixed election information for elections in the following countries: St. Vincent, Niger
• Fixed leadership information for the following countries: Malta
• Regime type changes for the following countries: Algeria (to presidential), Bolivia (to presidential), Kyrgyz Republic (to civilian provisional)
• Regime type histories corrected or expanded for the following countries: Bolivia, Kyrgyz Republic
• Substantially changed GitHub repo site for REIGN data to include new citation information, access to ELVI, new versioning information
• We have discontinued our online archive for monthly leader/election update information. This information is accessible through REIGN itself and the data should be consulted for historical leadership start dates and election outcomes.

PREVIOUS VERSION NOTES

November 2, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s September 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Added new ground-truth and projected GDP estimates using the IMF’s October 2020 World Economic Outlook projections and the World Bank’s 2019 estimates.
• Added new population data based on the IMF’s October 2020 World Economic Outlook projections.
• Added previously missing election events for the following countries: Algeria

October 5th, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s August 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Added new data for infant mortality rate from the World Bank. Future IMR forecasts now based on data up to 2019.
• Corrected election dates for the following countries: Tajikistan, Seychelles
• Added final outcome information for the following election events: Belgium

September 1st, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s July 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Corrected election dates for the following countries: New Zealand
• Added previously missing 2020 election events in the following countries: Singapore, Jamaica
• Added final outcome information for the following election events: Guyana, North Macedonia
• Regime changes: Mali changed from presidential to transitional militiary following a successful coup event

August 3rd, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s June 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Corrected election dates for the following countries: Belarus, New Zealand
• MAJOR UPDATE: Starting last year our team made an effort to audit our full election list to correct for potential miscodings surrounding election types, dates and outcomes. As a result, 156 corrections have been made to both the election list and our August 2020 REIGN data. You can find a table of changes made here. Credit to OEF Researcher Matthew Frank for leading our elections audit.

July 1st, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s May 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Added final election outcome codings for the following countries: Ireland
• Changed Macedonia to North Macedonia
• Added previously missing election events for the following countries: Russia, Croatia, North Macedonia
• Corrected election date for upcoming election event in Montenegro
• Made coding/typo/date corrections for election events in the following countries: Barbados, Malaysia, Denmark, Myanmar, Namibia, Palau, Tajikistan, Togo, Dominican Republic. (Credit and thanks to Jonas Vesbty for identifying these miscodings)

June 1st, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s April 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Added election delays for the following countries: Poland, Malawi
• Added previously missing election event for St. Kitts and Nevis

May 4th, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s March 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Made changes to the inputs for gdp measures related to CoupCast/ELVIS forecasting pipeline. Usually we would update GDP figures using the IMF’s World Economic Outlook release for April. However, COVID-19 has substantially disrupted IMF’s normal process. As a result we have replaced the original IMF gdp input with gdp PPP in international dollars.
• Updated armed conflict data to reflect new peace-deals for 2020 and added previously uncoded conflicts for the following countries: Libya, Egypt, Ukraine, Cameroon, Iraq, Iran, United States, United Kingdom, Mali, Philippines, Central African Republic, Somalia, Afghanistan
• Corrected leadership coding for Austria. Austria was coded as still having intermin Chancellor Bierlein as the chief executive. This has been changed to reflect Kurz’s return to the position.
• Added previously missed information about elections or election delays for the following countries: Guinea, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Dominican Republic

April 1st, 2020

• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s February 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Added final outcome information regarding the following elections: Afghanistan 2019, Israel 2020, Guyana 2020
• Added correct election date for the following election events: Kiribati 2020
• Added information about 2020 election delays for the following countries: Serbia 2020, Russia 2020, North Macedonia 2020, Chile 2020
• Changed regime type for Hungary from parliamentary democracy to single-party authoritarianism. This coding change was conducted in light of a recent bill granting the ruling Fidesz party unlimited emergency powers without a timeline (https://www.ft.com/content/0029e6e2-7344-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca).

March 6th, 2020

• Fixed coding error in which Paraguay’s leadership change in 2018 was not accounted for.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s December 2020 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Removed Tawfiq-Allawi (Iraq) as a leader following the withdrawal of his nomination earlier this month.
• Fixed miscoding of start date for James Marape in Papua New Guinea. This fixed a bug in which Marape’s tenure as PNG leader was not captured in the data.
• Fixed coding bug concerning Raul Casto. We had originally replaced Castro as leader with Diaz-Canel. However, we changed the coding back to Raul Castro after digging deeper into the Cuban political structure. When this occured, we failed to remove the exit date information for Raul Castro, effectively removing Cuba from the data for 2019/2020.

February 12th, 2020

• Fixed a bug in which leaders who began their tenure in 2020 were not fully captured beyond January. The current REIGN dataset reflects this fix.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s December 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• The methodology used for SPI projection beyond the NOAA measurements has changed since the last update. Previously, a single seasonal ARIMA model was used for every country. We now use an auto.arima function to fit the best model for each country during SPI forecasting.

January 8th, 2020

• No technical updates beyond new leaders and elections this month. All other predictors are using most up-to-date information.

December 2nd, 2019

• No technical updates beyond new leaders and elections this month. All other predictors are using most up-to-date information.
• The REIGN team has changed how the current leader and elections lists are stored. They are now stored directly into the GitHub repository for easier automation access. The stored files will follow the same naming pattern (ex: leaderlist_“2digitmonth”_“last2digityear”.csv)
• Archived versions of the leaderlist, electionlist and REIGN are available by request from our organizational Dropbox.

November 6th, 2019

• An acting PM for Tonga has been retroactively added to account for their leadership tenure before October’s selection of a new PM.
• Leadership in Cuba has been retroactively changed back to Raul Castro after examining the current leadership structure in Cuba.
• The coalition talks have been resolved in Belgium. Sophie Wilmès is now the first female prime minister in Belgian history.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s October 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Updated economic estimates with the IMF’s October Global Economic Outlook release (https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2019/10/01/world-economic-outlook-october-2019).
• Updated economic estimates with the World Bank’s newest GDP data (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.pcap.cd)
• Updated infant mortality rate estimates with the World Bank’s newest IMF data (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN)
• Updated internal political violence indicator using the newest Global Terrorism Database release (https://www.start.umd.edu/research-projects/global-terrorism-database-gtd)
• Updated internal political violence indicator using newest UCDP Georeferenced Event Data release (https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/)
• Updated regime type for Bolivia. Bolivia is now coded as a party-personalist government as of October 25th, 2019. This was a difficult decision and the REIGN team waited until after the election to come to a conclusion. Given the government’s behavior in previous term-limit debates and solid evidence of electoral irregularities, we have changed Bolivia from a presidential democracy to a party-personalist system.

October 1st, 2019

• Fixed leader election dates and national election outcomes related to the following leadership-country periods: Guyana 1964;1968, Paraguay 1989, Belgium 1995, Luxembourg 1954, Andorra 1985, West Germany Kissinger;Schdmit, Czechlosovakia 1990, Greece 1958;1961, Bulgaria 1949;1953-1986, Estonia 2007;2015, Latvia 2006, Armenia Kocheryan, Azerbaijan 1993; Finland 1982, Norway Torp, Iceland 1959, Mali 1974, Benin 1991;1996;2001;2006;2016, Guinea 1968;1974;1990;2001, Seychelles 2006;2015-2016, Sudan 1958, Israel Bengurion;Sharrett, Turkmenistan 2007; Tajikistan 1991;1994, South Korea 1979;1980, Myanmar Unu;Ubaswe, Sri Lanka 1952, Cambodia 1976;1998, Australia 1966;1975, Tuvalu 2004;2010
• Coalition outcome for Belgian general election is expected to take time, so the result is uncoded as of this update. (September Update: Looks like Belgium is in for a long caretaker period. If nothing changes, expect a PM change in December 2019 due to Michel’s new commitments to the European Council).
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s August 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).
• Updated regime type for Sudan. Sudan is now coded as a Civilian Provisional government as of August 2019. The REIGN team waited a month after the adoption of the Sovereignty Council of Sudan before making the decision. While the council will be headed by the military for the first 39 months of the transition, it lays the groundwork for civilian rule.

September 3rd, 2019

• Hotfix implemented to detect and correct “blank” country names in the first month of tenure for the following leaders: De Roburt (Nauru), Nakyama (Micronesia), Pashinyan (Armenia), da Costa (Sao Tome), Lini (Vanautu), Remeliik (Paulau). Hotfix will dynamically fix any problems with missing country names for future leaders.
• Coalition outcome for Belgian general election is expected to take time, so the result is uncoded as of this update. (September Update: Looks like Belgium is in for a long caretaker period. If nothing changes, expect a PM change in December 2019 due to Michel’s new commitments to the European Council).
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s July 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.prel.html).

July 30th, 2019

• Identified a number of leaders (DeRoburt, Da Costa, Nakyama, Lini, Remeliik, Pashinyan) who do not have country codings for the first month of their tenure. This is an unexpected bug in the leader panel creation process and is currently being worked on.
• Coalition outcome for Belgian general election is expected to take time, so the result is uncoded as of this update.

July 2nd, 2019

• Identified a number of leaders (DeRoburt, Da Costa, Nakyama, Lini, Remeliik, Pashinyan) who do not have country codings for the first month of their tenure. This is an unexpected bug in the leader panel creation process and is currently being worked on.
• Pavel Filip and Maia Sandu both switch head executive status twice during the month of June in the REIGN dataset. This isn’t perfect, but it is difficult to code leadership shifts within a constitutional crisis. This coding may change based on future information.
• Coalition outcome for Belgian general election is expected to take time, so the result is uncoded as of this update.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s May 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.precl.html).

June 3rd, 2019

• Corrected leadership change for Australia to Morrison. This was not originally changed in August 2018.
• Coalition outcome for Belgian general election is expected to take time, so the result is uncoded as of this update.
• Election outcome for Thailand currently unknown, so the result is uncoded as of this update.
• Finalized outcome data is coded for Andorra, Finland, and Indonesia.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s April 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.precl.html).

May 1st, 2019

• Fixed election outcome information for Estonia 2019 as coalition outcome was previously unclear.
• Preliminary outcome data is coded for Andorra, Finland, and Indonesia. These may change.
• Changed regime type for Sudan to military provisional.
• Changed regime type for Algeria to civilian provisional.
• Changed regime type for Egypt to military personalist.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s March 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.precl.html).
• Updated GDP and population data using the April 2019 IMF world economic outlook release (https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2019/01/weodata/index.aspx).
• Updated GDP using the newest World Bank release (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ny.gdp.mktp.cd).
• Updated infant mortality rate data with newest World Bank release (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.imrt.in). Implemented country-specific ARIMA modeling for forecasting mortality rate for unreleased years. These numbers were previously produced using forward filling for unknown years.
• Added coup events in Sudan and Venezuela.
• Changed regime type for Turkey to party-personal hybrid (May 6th 2019) based on annulment of mayoral elections on May 6th.

April 9th, 2019

• Tuvalu 2019 election deadline fixed.
• Retroactively added Afghanistan December 2018 election delay/voiding.
• Changed North Korea election type from executive to legislative.
• Updated precipitation (SPI) estimates using NOAA’s Jan 2019 PREC/L release (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.precl.html)
• Corrected Israel’s election date for April and announcement of early election in December 2018.

March 1st, 2019

• Fixed Comoros presidential election dates/sequences.
• Fixed spelling of Canada country name.
• Fixed duplicate leader-month rows for Colombia.
• Fixed duplicate leader-month rows for Armenia.
• Added regularly accessible regime type data for download and for the democracyData R package

February 7th, 2019

• Fixed a number of wrongly coded election outcomes.
• Fixed a bug in leadership transition data regarding Liberia that caused duplicate leader-month rows.
• Updated precipitation projections with December 2018 NOAA PREC/L numbers.
• Updated armed conflict event data for new onsets and previous conflict termination.
• Added new coup event in Gabon - January 2019.