stack-1979.csv

Published

July 28, 2022

Stack (1979) studied predictors of income inequality in a paper published in the American Sociological Review. He posited that more political participation and a strong Socialist party in a country would be associated with less income inequality. To control for variation in economic development, he included a measure of energy consumption, which had been identified as a reasonable economic proxy in previous studies. Stack’s data, stored in stack-1979.csv, include four attributes measured on 18 countries. The attributes are:

country: Country name
inequality: Ratio of the share of income received by the most wealthy population quintile (richest 20%) to the share received by the poorest 40% of the population; Higher values indicate more income inequality
turnout: Proportion of the adult population voting in the most recent national election prior to 1972
energy: Energy consumption per capita (expressed in million metric tons of coal equivalents; higher values indicate more economic development
socialist: Annual average proportion of seats held by socialist parties in the national legislature, over the first twenty postwar years

Data Preview

Code

# Import data
stack = readr::read_csv(file = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zief0002/pensive-giraffe/main/data/stack-1979.csv")

# View data
stack

ABCDEFGHIJ0123456789

country <chr>	inequality <dbl>	turnout <dbl>	energy <dbl>	socialist <dbl>
Argentina	2.960	61.8	1088	2.3
Australia	1.940	85.3	3918	45.0
Denmark	2.734	86.8	2829	41.8
Finland	4.441	82.1	1650	24.9
France	5.653	66.5	2419	25.1
West Germany	3.435	77.6	3673	27.1
Israel	1.950	84.1	1243	50.8
Italy	2.916	89.2	1135	17.0
Japan	3.007	72.3	1166	27.5
Netherlands	3.457	87.9	2691	30.8

References

Stack, S. (1979). The effects of political participation and socialist party strength on the degree of income inequality. American Sociological Review, 44(1), 168–171.