Introducing xSub: A new portal for cross-national data on subnational violence
| Author | Yuri M Zhukov,Christian Davenport,Nadiya Kostyuk |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343319836697 |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Special Data Feature
Introducing xSub: A new portal for
cross-national data on subnational violence
Yuri M Zhukov , Christian Davenport & Nadiya Kostyuk
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Abstract
Researchers today have access to an unprecedented amount of geo-referenced, disaggregated data on political
conflict. Because these new data sources use disparate event typologies and units of analysis, findings are rarely
comparable across studies. As a result, we are unable to answer basic questions like ‘what does conflict A tell us
about conflict B?’ This article introduces xSub – a ‘database of databases’ for disaggregated research on political
conflict (www.x-sub.org). xSub reduces barriers to comparative subnational research, by empowering researchers
to quickly construct custom, analysis-ready datasets. xSub currently features subnational data on conflict in 156
countries, from 21 sources, including large data collections and data from individual scholars. To facilitate
comparisons across countries and sources, xSub organizes these data into consistent event categories, actors, spatial
units (country, province, district, grid cell, electoral constituency), and time units (year, month, week, and day).
This article introduces xSub and illustrates its potential, by investigating the impact of repression on dissent across
thousands of subnational datasets.
Keywords
conflict, contention, disaggregation, event data, micro-foundations, protest, repression, subnational, violence
In the last two decades, social scientists have produced a
tremendous amount of disaggregated data on political
conflict and violence.
1
Large-scale collection projects
(e.g. Schrodt, Davis & Weddle, 1994; Raleigh et al.,
2010; Salehyan et al., 2012; Sundberg & Melander,
2013) and specialized studies of individual countries
(e.g. Sullivan, Loyle & Davenport, 2012; Verpoorten,
2012; Osorio, 2015) have extracted georeferenced
information on political events from press reports,
social media, and state archives, manually or with auto-
matedtechniques.Thesedatahavefuelednewwavesof
subnational research, employing novel research designs
at granular levels of analysis.
Disaggregation has advanced scholarship in numerous
ways, but five interrelated problems have impeded
progress: (1) most studies that use subnational data nev-
ertheless conduct analysis at a highly aggregated, macro
level; (2) most micro-level studies focus on one or few
countries; (3) cross-dataset comparisons are rare; (4)
operational definitions vary; and (5) there are no consis-
tent units of analysis, which might otherwise enable
direct comparisons. As a result, idiosyncratic and contra-
dictory findings have become common in subnational
research, leaving unanswered basic questions about the
causes, dynamics, and consequences of conflict.
The barrier to generalizability is not a lack of data – in
many cases these data exist and are in the public domain.
Rather, it is that no one has undertaken the entrepre-
neurial effort to merge and combine disparate subna-
tional conflict datasets into a unified, analysis-ready
format, with consistent definitions, measures, and units.
This is no small task: it involves geo-locating events,
classifying them by type, assigning them to
Corresponding author:
zhukov.yuri@gmail.com
1
We define political conflict as a dispute between two or more
political actors (e.g. governments, challengers, third parties) over
the pursuit, maintenance or distribution of power. Actions to
resolve the dispute may include both physical force and nonviolent
measures (e.g. demonstrations, strikes, civil disobedience).
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(4) 604–614
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343319836697
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