Presenting the Governmental Incompatibilities Data Project (GIDP) 2.0

This research note introduces a new dataset—the Governmental Incompatibilities Data Project (GIDP) 2.0—which identifies the presence of incompatibilities over government for all countries in the world from 1960-2020. Incompatibilities over government involve organizations making maximalist claims related to the legitimacy of elections, the composition of the national government, or regime change. GIDP 2.0 includes information about which of these claims is present in each incompatibility year. These data can facilitate analyses of the onset, dynamics, and outcomes of both civil war and nonviolent campaigns, improve our ability to predict their occurrence, and allow for analysis of whether international efforts to prevent violent conflicts over government are effective. We present a series of descriptive analyses showing that governmental incompatibilities are common but not ubiquitous, and occur across time periods, and within and across regime types. These descriptive analyses further show interesting variation among the types of claims articulated in democracies, autocracies, and anocracies and across different types of autocratic institutions. A brief two stage analysis shows that some factors commonly included in studies of armed conflict and nonviolent campaign onset have different effects on the emergence of governmental incompatibilities and on whether these incompatibilities escalate to mass mobilization.