Named Entities for Social Science

They are the unit of analysis for a substantial part of the IR literature, but they are difficult to reconcile with other knowledge bases and subject to quirky coding decisions that lead to undesirable results that do not map to reality. We introduce a new approach to classifying states that have several advantages over past efforts. We attempt to bring the state membership list used by the Correlates of War Project into the age of big data by reconciling its classifications with the criteria used for knowledge bases such as wikipedia, resulting in a more complete dataset of all polities existing between 1800-2016.