Retrieve Chronology of Constitutional Events Dataset

Downloads the Chronology of Constitutional Events (CCE) Dataset to a temporary directory from the Comparative Constitutions Project website.

Usage

get_cce(load = TRUE, del_file = TRUE, write_out = FALSE)

Arguments

load

Logical to load downloaded data into local environment.

del_file

Logical to delete downloaded and unzipped files/directories after loading into the local environment.

write_out

Logical to write the CCE dataset to your local directory as a .csv file.

Value

A data.frame of CCE country-year data.

Details

The CCE Dataset

The Chronology of Constitutional Events (CCE) is a narrowly focused offering containing annual country-year observations of generalized "constitutional events". There are 6 unique designations:

1. New Constitution

2. Amendment

3. Interim Constitution

4. Suspended Constitution

5. Reinstated Constitution

6. Non-Event (years without the above)

The limited scope of the CCE lends itself more to timeline visualizations or a quick reference, but could be helpful when used in conjunction with additional datasets or in other applications. CCE could also be used to derive quantitative metrics of constitutional stability similar to those included with version 2.0 of the Institutions and Elections Project.

Variables

Version 1.3 of the CCE dataset contains 20,429 observations and 6 variables. The include:

cowcode

The numeric Correlates of War country code.

country

The CCE country name.

year

Year of observation.

systid

CCE identification number for the constitutional system.

evntid

CCE identification number for the constitutional event.

evnttype

CCE event type; see above.

See also

The Comparative Constitutions Project

Examples

cce<-get_cce(del_file=TRUE, write_out = FALSE)