Individual Exercise

Use the Global Terrorism Database contained in GTD.csv to estimate a model where the number of terrorist attacks in a country-year is explained by GDP per capita and VDEM’s polyarchy score (v2x_polyarchy). WDI and the vdem packages (https://github.com/xmarquez/vdem) are your friends. Include a random intercept term by country, and allow the mean of country random intercepts to vary by year. Produce a publication quality table of your results. Is there more variation between countries or between years?

library(tidyverse)
library(WDI)
library(vdem)
library(lme4)
library(texreg)

## load GTD
gtd <- read.csv('~/Dropbox/Datasets/GTD/GTD.csv')

## get GDP
wb <- WDI(indicator = c('NY.GDP.PCAP.KD'), start = 1970, end = 2014) %>%
  rename(gdp = NY.GDP.PCAP.KD) %>%
  select(-iso2c)

## get polyarchy
vdem <- extract_vdem(name_pattern = 'v2x_polyarchy', include_uncertainty = F) %>%
  select(country = vdem_country_name, year, polyarchy = v2x_polyarchy) %>% 
  filter(year %in% 1970:2014)

## collapse GTD and combine data
gtd <- gtd %>% group_by(country_txt, iyear) %>%
  summarize(attacks = n()) %>% # calculate attacks per year
  rename(country = country_txt, year = iyear) %>% # rename columns for joining
  filter(country != '') %>% # drop attacks without a country
  left_join(wb) %>% # join gdp
  left_join(vdem) %>% # join polyarchy
  mutate_at(vars(gdp, polyarchy), scale) %>% # scale gdp and polyarchy
  na.omit() # drop incomplete observations

## fit model
mod <- glmer(attacks ~ gdp + polyarchy + (1 | year / country), data = gtd, family = poisson(link = 'log'))

## present table
htmlreg(mod, stars = .05, custom.coef.names = c('Intercept', 'GDP<sub>PC</sub>',
                                                'Polyarchy'))
Statistical models
Model 1
Intercept 2.02*
(0.05)
GDPPC -0.06
(0.04)
Polyarchy 0.17*
(0.04)
AIC 21607.07
BIC 21636.45
Log Likelihood -10798.54
Num. obs. 2634
Num. groups: country:year 2634
Num. groups: year 44
Var: country:year (Intercept) 3.15
Var: year (Intercept) 0.05
*p < 0.05

The variance of the year random intercept is 0.05 while the variance of the country random intercept is 3.15, so there is much more variation across countries than across years.