Download the data

Cite the data

Melissa M. Lee and Nan Zhang. 2017. “Legibility and the Informational Foundations of State Capacity.” Journal of Politics 79 (1): 118-132. https://doi.org/10.1086/688053

Melissa M. Lee and Nan Zhang. 2020. State Capacity Scores. http://statecapacityscores.org.

Calculate Myers Scores for your own data

Myers Scores can be calculated for any sample as long as your data are formatted as counts of population by single age. If you have microdata, you should first aggregate these data into the appropriate political unit of analysis. Our simulations suggest that the minimum population threshold should be 2,000 individuals.

In Stata, you can calculate Myers Scores using German Rodriguez‘s user-created command called “myers.” Download it in Stata by typing the following in the command line: “net install myers, from(https://data.princeton.edu/eco572/stata)”

Technical note: the Myers Index calculation requires specifying an age range. This age range must consist of a multiple of 10. We calculated our Myers Scores using the range [15–74]. The lower bound excludes children, while the higher bound reflects the upper limit of ages reported in many censuses. In the syntax for the myers command, this range corresponds to (range(15 64)).