First batch of the data from the classification project

The first batch of the data from the project is now available here: http://goo.gl/oSk8z

More graphs and charts from that data are coming soon (watch this space), but you can get started using it if you feel like it. Do use your groups! The Facebook pages you set up - consult with others there about how you might use the data to arrive at an answer to the question of the correlation between economic growth and state control, and what the limitations of the data may be. (Google Fusion Tables has various useful features to visualize/summarize data, though they are not intuitive to use; there may be somebody in your group who can help, or you can request a specific summary from me).

I've cleaned up and interpreted your answers to arrive at an average judgment for each country/year. (I've omitted some years where too few people entered data). In the spirit of the original winning proposal by the "Big Guns" group I've calculated an index of "state control" that goes from 0 (basically no state control) to 25 (complete control over all the aspects included in the survey - no elections, complete control over the economy, only government media, etc.).  This is the third column in the dataset, and it is highly but not perfectly correlated with other measures (at least for the years before 2011): the correlation is 0.85 with both Polity IV and the Unified Democracy Scores. (More later on which countries in your dataset are different).

Next, there's a summary of your confidence and difficulty ratings; lower numbers indicate, respectively, less confidence and less difficulty. You can use these to think about which countries were most difficult to rate.

The next set of variables are an average of the interpretable answers for each country/year/question in the survey; lower numbers generally mean lower levels of state control of society, as I understood the original group proposal. (E.g., "0" for elections means all offices are elected; 3 means no offices are elected). The final index mentioned above is simply the sum of all of these scores. (Question: should we calculate the index differently? Weight the variables in some other way?).

Next, there are a couple of comparison variables: the Polity2 score (lower is more autocratic, in their scheme) and the UD score (lower is more autocratic, in their scheme).

Next, there is some data about GDP and GDP growth, taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI). Note there is no data yet for 2011, so I've used the 2010 numbers for 2011. This should not be too problematic, since regimes usually change slowly, but consider whether it might bias the results in some way.

Finally, there are some country and region codes that might be useful for mapping the data.

Requests for summaries, plots, etc. are welcome in the comments to this post. Discuss in your groups/tutorials!