¹ Several other major collections of macropolitical information have been the subject of various research articles and monographs but have not been published in their entirety. The variables of R. J. Rummel's “Dimensionality of Nations” (DON) project are similar to those of the World Handbook II. They are described and analyzed, but not tabled, in Rummel, R. J., The Dimensions of Nations (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1972)Google Scholar. Two other important data collections are Kenneth Janda's “Comparative Political Parties Project” archives at Northwestern University and William Flanigan and Edwin Fogelman's archive of time-series data on the properties of democratic states from 1800 to 1960, at the University of Minnesota.

² The data sets for all of the four handbooks reviewed here are available, with relevant documentation, from the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at Ann Arbor, Michigan.

³ One other such handbook was published after this review essay was prepared: Mickiewicz, Ellen, ed., Handbook of Soviet Social Science Data (Riverside, N.J.: The Free Press, 1973)Google Scholar. Its objectives and contents are similar to those of the handbooks under review here but it relies almost solely on data from official sources.

⁴ Richardson, Lewis F., Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. (Pittsburgh: Boxwood Press, 1960)Google Scholar Sorokin, Pitirim A., Social and Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 3: Fluctuations of Social Relationships, War and Revolution (New York: American Book Co., 1937)Google Scholar and Wright, Quincy, A Study of War, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

⁵ Russett, Bruce M., Alker, Hayward R. Jr., Deutsch, Karl W., Lasswell, Harold D., and others, World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Banks, Arthur S. and Textor, Robert B., A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1963)Google ScholarPubMed.

⁶ A “review of reviews” is to be found in Taylor, Charles L., “Further Problems: A Consideration of Other Views, with a bibliography of reviews of the World Handbook ,” in Aggregate Data Analysis: Political and Social Indicators in Cross-National Research, Taylor, C. L., ed. (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, for the International Social Science Council, 1968.)Google Scholar Self-conscious theoretical and critical discussions of many issues underlying the first edition of the World Handbook also are presented in Merritt, Richard L. and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Comparing Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁷ Gurr, Ted, New Error-Compensated Measures for Comparing Nations: Some Correlates of Civil Violence (Princeton: Center of International Studies, Princeton University, Research Monograph No. 25, 1966), pp. 67–110 Google Scholar.

⁸ Representative published studies which examine temporal variations using data from these handbooks are Banks, Arthur S., “Correlates of Democratic Performance,” Comparative Politics, 4 (January 1972), 217–230 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hudson, Michael C., Conditions of Political Violence and Instability: A Preliminary Test of Three Hypotheses (Beverly Hills: Sage Professional Papers in Comparative Politics, 01–005, 1970)Google Scholar; and Singer, J. David and Small, Melvin, “Alliance Aggregation and the Onset of War 1815–1945,” in Quantitative International Politics: Insights and Evidence, ed. Singer, J. D., (New York: The Free Press, 1968), pp. 247–286 Google Scholar.

⁹ Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics.

¹⁰ See pp. 125–126.

¹¹ Such criticisms have been made especially pointedly by scholars with a Marxist perspective, for example, Jenkins, Robin, Exploitation: The World Power Structure and the Inequality of Nations (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970)Google Scholar. The criticism is directed against data with a governmental origin and against its aggregation at the national level. Nonetheless the Marxists use the data they criticize to support their own arguments about inequalities, as does Jenkins and also Jalée, Pierre, The Pillage of the Third World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968)Google Scholar. Moreover, world-wide collections of aggregate political and social data also have been published by Marxist-oriented institutions, including a two-volume handbook issued in 1962 by the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences (in Czech) and another published several years earlier by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (in German).

¹² The World Handbook II includes a “press freedom” index which might be used in comparative analyses of data from government sources as a “control” variable—literally and statistically. It also could be used to evaluate the reliability of some kinds of measures, and to weight others—e.g., the conflict indicators. R. J. Rummel, in Dimensions of Nations, has used a press censorship index to test for effects of biases in some of his analyses but his example has not been much acted upon or elaborated by others.