ABSTRACT

How does sourcing affect which events are included in international relations datasets? The increasing number of machine-coded datasets offers the promise of coding a larger corpus of documents more quickly, but existing automated processes rely exclusively on databases of news reports for coverage. We exploit source variation in the UCDP GED dataset, which includes events from media reports and non-media sources, to explore the bias introduced by including only media reports in international relations datasets. Unlike previous studies, our approach allows us to compare subnational and cross-national determinants of bias. We find that media sources severely underreport events in African countries, and coverage is also associated with country-level factors like international trade and subnational factors like access to communication technology. Non-media sources cover a significant number of events not included in media sources; their inclusion can expand coverage and reduce bias in datasets.

摘要

采购如何影响国际关系数据集中包含哪些事件？越来越多的机器编码数据集提供了更快地编码更大的文档集的希望，但是现有的自动化流程仅依赖新闻报道数据库进行报道。我们利用UCDP GED数据集中的源变化（包括来自媒体报告和非媒体源的事件）来探索仅在国际关系数据集中包含媒体报告而引入的偏见。与以前的研究不同，我们的方法允许我们比较偏见的地区性和跨国性决定因素。我们发现，媒体来源严重低估了非洲国家的报道活动，而且报道还与国家层面的因素（如国际贸易）和国家以下因素（如获得通信技术）相关。非媒体来源涵盖了很多未包含在媒体来源中的事件；将它们包括在内可以扩大覆盖范围并减少数据集中的偏差。