Abstract

Answering the question “how many countries are there in the world?” turns out to be more complex than it seems, as there is currently no quantitative tool dedicated to this issue. Starting from the lists of national political units created by the instigators of the Correlates of War project, we have built a dataset and visual documentation that identifies the political status, whether sovereign or non-sovereign, of the geopolitical entities of the world from 1816 to the present. This paper aims to present the new dataset, GeoPolHist, by explaining the conceptual and methodological issues raised by the construction of this type of dataset as well as the scientific interest of such data for research on the political history of the world or on the impact of political status.

摘要

回答“世界上有多少个国家”的问题。事实证明，这比看起来的要复杂，因为目前没有专门针对此问题的定量工具。从战争相关项目的发起者创建的国家政治单位列表开始，我们构建了一个数据集和可视化文档，用于识别从 1816 年到现在。本文旨在介绍新的数据集 GeoPolHist，通过解释构建此类数据集所引发的概念和方法问题，以及此类数据对研究世界政治史或政治历史影响的科学兴趣。政治地位。