What can a flood of new data tell us about "The State"?

When browsing through academic journals I often come across some new dataset that makes me think “oh this could be useful!”. But I don’t usually work with datasets, so I stare at them for a minute and move on.

That seems like a waste. There’s so much new data available, and many new interesting questions to ask, especially for people used to working with data. So I will occasionally collect especially interesting datasets and post them here.

I’ll try to sketch out a few puzzles we can ask by looking at these datasets, since the goal here is to see what new questions we could ask (or even answer) using the new data.

This edition of Dataset Roundup focuses on state-building.

Over the past few months I’ve encountered a few datasets dealing with some major element of state-building: taxes, army recruitment, internal borders. All of these are from 2026, and all have been published in major poli sci journals.

I’ll discuss each one briefly and what interesting questions emerge from the data, and conclude by trying to find some parallels or common themes among the datasets.

(I expect this to become a regular feature for subscribers. Dataset roundups dealing with autocracy, coups, and historical IR are in the works -- stay tuned.)