The UNPC package provides helpful tools to calculate the political competition between mutliple countries in respective to a third- party country. The new measurement for political competition provides a unique indicator for political competition among multiple countries. It takes into account the relation between countries in respective to a third-party country and allows for the country-level distinction of political competition since 1946. This is not only offering great insights for many fields of academic research in the field of IPE and foreign assistance but further can be used to highlight potential alliances and divergencies during specific epochs over time.

Installation

You can install UNPC from github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("LuMesserschmidt/UNPC")

Details

When analyzing the competition of multiple countries, we need to take into account how external countries compete and where the third country is placed. The first element of the measurement provides information on how countries compete in general. Second, we are interested whether a third-party country has the same distance to other countries (high competition), or if a country is closer to one and far away from the other country (low competition). Therefore, the competition measurement exists of two components: The first takes into account the competition of multiple countries in respective to the third-party country (epsilon). The second uses the information of the political competition between the other countries without the competed country (distance). The final measurement „unpack“ is a product of both single estimators. The measurements limit 1 if there is a competition and zero if there is no competition.