R Programming

we will explore some descriptive questions about ethnicity and conflict, using data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, drawn from Weidmann, Nils B. 2011. “Violence ‘from Above’ or ‘from Below’? The Role of Ethnicity in Bosnia’s Civil War”, Journal of Politics 73(4): 1178-1190. We have two versions of this dataset: The first version of the dataset is a simple text file called “[login to view URL]”, where the fields are separated by tabulators. The second version of the data comes in three different files, [login to view URL]”, “[login to view URL]”, and “[login to view URL]”. These data include information on the geographical shapes and positions of the different districts in Bosnia, in addition to the variables. This format is called a shapefile, and is a common format for GIS software such as ArcGIS. We will use this version to create maps of the Bosnia data later. You can find these files on Moodle. The data include observations for 109 Bosnian municipalities. The variables in the data are listed below: SP_ID Spatial polygon ID MUNID Municipality ID code name Name TOTINCOME Income of municipality in 1991 TOTPOP91 Population of municipality in 1991 roadlength Length of roads in district area Area of municpality distserbia Distance from Serbia distcroati Distance from Croatia KILLED Number of people killed in war MISSING Number of people reported missing pol_local Residential polarization index urban91 Urbanization strat91 Territorial contestation index roaddensity Road density [login to view URL] log10 distance to Serbia [login to view URL] log10 distance to Croatia borderdist distance to border BORDER Border municipality MOSLEMS91 Muslim population in 1991 SERBS91 Serb population in 1991 CROATS91 Croat population in 1991 MOSLEMS01 Muslim population in 2001 SERBS01 Serb population in 2001 CROATS01 Croat population in 2001 (1) Using the Bosnia 1991 population shares at the municipality level, compute a measure of ethnic fractionalization for each municipality according to the # ELF formula: ELF = 1-sum_i(s_i^2), where sum_i is the sum over all groups, and s_i is the share of the respective group. Save your result in a new variable called ELF91. Draw a histogram of the distribution, and comment on what this tells us about the pre-war ethnic population distribution. (2) Now find the ELF for municipalities in 2001 using the appropriate population figures in the dataset. Present and discuss the changes in ethnic fractionalization between 1991 and 2001. How has the overall distribution changed overall for the countries, and what districts have changed the most? (3) Are the population changes related to conflict experience? (Hint: one way to do this is to create a plot of change in ELF by death rates, and use linear regression to estimate the “average” impact of the death rate on changes in ELF. Lab 4 provides some examples). (4) Examine the variation in the death rate (i.e., casualties per capita) across municipalities, using linear regression and two measures developed by Weidmann (2011), “residential polarization” and “territorial contestation”, controlling for per capita income. Comment on the results. You will need to create a per capita income measure yourself, dividing income by population. To facilitate interpretation, here is how the two ethic geography measures were created. See the cited articles for more detailed discussions.