stack-1979.csv

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

# A tibble: 6 x 5
  country      inequality turnout energy socialist
  <chr>             <dbl>   <dbl>  <dbl>     <dbl>
1 Argentina          2.96    61.8   1088       2.3
2 Australia          1.94    85.3   3918      45  
3 Denmark            2.73    86.8   2829      41.8
4 Finland            4.44    82.1   1650      24.9
5 France             5.65    66.5   2419      25.1
6 West Germany       3.44    77.6   3673      27.1