Empirical Indicators of Crisis Phase in the Middle East, 1979-1995 (ICPSR 1136)

Version Date: Oct 9, 1997

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Principal Investigator(s):
Philip A. Schrodt, University of Kansas. Department of Political Science; Deborah J. Gerner, University of Kansas. Department of Political Science

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR01136.v1

Version V1

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Summary

The article uses several statistical techniques to identify and analyze phases in an event dataset measuring the political behavior among eight Middle Eastern actors -- Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria, the United States, and USSR/Russia -- for the period July 1979 to June 1995. Consistent with narrative accounts, factor analysis identifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Lebanon as the two most important features of the data. Other factors reflect inter-Arab and major-power relationships. Discriminant analysis can distinguish a set of human-coded phases with about 90 percent accuracy. Stepwise discriminant achieves 70 percent accuracy using data from only 12 of the 54 directed dyads. Finally, K-means cluster analysis identifies five distinct phases that align fairly well with the human-coded phases, particularly in the first half of the time period. The dataset consists of WEIS-coded events generated from Reuters lead sentences downloaded from the NEXIS data service, then coded using the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) machine coding system. One file provides the raw event data (approximately 110,000 events). A second tab-delimited file aggregates these events into dyad-months using the Goldstein (1992) scaling. The KEDS coding dictionaries and the program used to generate the data are also included in the ICPSR Publication-Related Archive release. Additional information can be obtained from the World Wide Web at http://www.ukans.edu/~keds.

Citation

Schrodt, Philip A., and Gerner, Deborah J. Empirical Indicators of Crisis Phase in the Middle East, 1979-1995. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1997-10-09. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR01136.v1

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Funding

National Science Foundation, University of Kansas. General Research Fund Program

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1979 -- 1995

Data Collection Notes

  1. The files submitted are ReadMe.txt, a description of the file formats (ASCII), WEISData.txt, Daily Levant event data for April 1979 to June 1995 (ASCII), GoldDyad.txt, tab-delimited Goldstein scores by dyad-month for all dyads involving ISR, JOR, LEB, PAL, SYR, UAR, USA, and USR for July 1979 to June 1995 (ASCII), KEDS.9B2.1, a KEDS Macintosh computer program used to generate the data (binary), and Reuter95.actors, Reuter95.verbs, and Reuter95.special, which are KEDS coding dictionaries (ASCII).

  2. These data are part of ICPSR's Publication-Related Archive and are distributed exactly as they arrived from the data depositor. ICPSR has not checked or processed this material. Users should consult the investigator(s) if further information is desired.

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Original Release Date

1997-10-09

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:
  • Schrodt, Philip A., and Deborah J. Gerner. Empirical Indicators of Crisis Phase in the Middle East, 1979-1995. ICPSR01136-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 1997-10-09. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR01136.v1
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Notes

  • These data are flagged as replication datasets and are distributed exactly as they arrived from the data depositor. ICPSR has not checked or processed this material. Users should consult the investigator(s) if further information is desired.

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.