Replication data for: Deterring or Displacing Electoral Irregularities? Spillover Effects of Observers in a Randomized Field Experiment in Ghana

There are two datasets that accompany “Deterring or Displacing Electoral Irregularities? Spillover Effects of Observers in a Randomized Field Experiment in Ghana,” (Journal of Politics, 2012, 74(1): 292-307). Each observation in the main dataset, IchinoSchuendeln_spilloversJOP, is an electoral area. The electoral area-level voter registration numbers for 2004 and 2008 were calculated from official voter registration numbers at the polling station level and aggregated to the electoral area level. We use whether an observer filed a report for the registration center for a particular electoral area as our measure of whether that electoral area was visited by a registration observer. To produce the variables disttoclosestTela through visitedin0510C, we georeferenced the Electoral Commission’s (paper) map of constituency boundaries. We also geocoded the 868 electoral areas in our experiment as points by comparing the names of the polling stations located within those electoral areas with publicly available printed and digital maps, data from the 2000 population and housing census, coordinates from GPS we deployed with some of the registration observers, and on occasion, information given by local electoral officials. The second dataset, IchinoSchuendeln_spilloversJOP_ELAdistance is not needed to reproduce the main results but is needed for the randomization inference analysis. Each observation is a pair of electoral areas in the same constituency and this dataset includes the electoral area identifier code and the distance between the two electoral areas in kilometers.