#Replication files for "Strongmen Cry Too: The Effect of Aerial Bombing on Voting for The Incumbent in Competitive Autocracies"

The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which lasted from March 24, 1999 until June 10, 1999, was the largest air campaign in Europe since the bombing of Britain and Germany in World War II. The air raids lasted for 78 days and hit 108 out of 160 municipalities, excluding Kosovo and Montenegro. The bombing was spread out and largely aimed at military barracks, industrial facilities, transportation networks, and communication lines. This repo provides a novel dataset with information on over 1,000 targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including the date, location, target type, and fatalities. Included is also R code for the replication of my article "Strongmen Cry Too: The Effect of Aerial Bombing on Voting for The Incumbent in Competitive Autocracies" that was accepted for publication at Journal of Peace Research.

In a nutshell, the replication material includes the following files:

- code.r and robust_summary.r files. The code file includes the replication code, which I originally ran in R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02) -- "Feather Spray". robust_summary.r is the function developed by [Isidore Beautrelet ](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IsidoreBeautrelet/economictheoryblog/master/robust_summary.R), which computes clustered robust standard errors. You will need to run this function using a line of code in code.r to replicate my results.

- There are three data frames in .csv format. First, did_elections_final.csv is the panel dataset for the replication of the figures and tables in the article and appendix. Second, gradovi.csv includes the names and geo coordinates in EPSG4326 (WGS84) that are used to produce Figure 1. Finally, polls.csv consists of aggregated polling results for Milosevic's party in the 1990s and come from the Institute of Social Science in Belgrade. The raw polling data and codebooks are available upon request.

- nato_bombing.csv is the dataset that includes information on the location, coordinates, and date of NATO bombing. The column type designates the nature of the target (if applicable) while descr column specifies the target subcategory (if applicable). The information on deaths from the bombing (deaths) and their categorization (death_stat) originates from [The Humanitarian Law Center's data](http://www.hlc-rdc.org/db/nato_en/index.html). Finally the source of the bombing entry is provided under column source. 
This dataset comes with information on over 1,000 targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, including the date, location, target type, and fatalities. The majority of targets were military objects and forces (63%) followed by the industry (13%), transport infrastructure (9%), civilian (7%), communications facilities (7%), and other targets (1%). It is, by far, one of the most comprehensive and precise datasets on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Other essential datasets include Human Rights Data Analysis Group's dataset on killings in Kosovo, and Humanitarian Law Center's database of NATO bombing victims. The dataset was manually coded and includes information on the location of bombings as reported in the media from March 24 until June 10, 1999. In specific, the information on bombed municipalities mainly comes from then pro-opposition Serbian daily (Glas Javnosti) and two major Serbian weeklies (NIN and Vreme). Reports from the state-owned news agency Tanjug, the Human Rights Watch and the Database on casualties of the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) in Belgrade were used for data triangulation as well as the identification of under-reported strikes against the army.
While the dataset does not necessarily include the universe of all strikes, the level of under-reporting is restricted to targets in Kosovo and especially attacks on military forces. The under-reporting in Kosovo originates from limited media presence in the province since the outset of the conflict. Because Kosovo is excluded from the analysis, this issue does not affect the results of this study. The under-reporting of attacks on military units is due to restricted access to the placement of Yugoslav security forces in the field as well as their mobility in attempts to avoid NATO strikes. Some of these attacks were not reported by the media while others were reported but lacked information on the exact location. In the latter's case, the media vaguely referred to strikes in a ''wider area'' of a region or across a mountain range. Such cases were omitted from the analysis. Fortunately, such occurrences were rare, less than 10 or equivalently less than 1\% of all strikes, and I was able to pin down a few unreported locations using the HLC database of casualties. Any remaining bias from the omission of strikes on military forces may not necessarily affect the inference because the focus of this article is on the bombing events that directly impact on the lives of voters. 

- Shapefiles neccessary for the replication of the maps are also stored in this repo. SRB_adm2.shp are municipality polygons for Serbia proper in the 1990s and I created them from the scratch using the latest settlement shapefile from [Geosrbija](https://geosrbija.rs/) and the 1991 census. Following list of municipalities and their settlements from the 1991 census, I aggregated the settlement level shapefile to the 1991 municipality level shapefile. Other shapefiles in this folder are administrative level 0 polygons for Montenegro (MNE_adm0), Kosovo (XKO_adm0) and Serbia proper (SRB_adm0), which I downloaded from [OSM Geofabrik](https://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html).

- article.pdf is the last version of the paper that was conditionally accepted by Journal of Peace Research and appendix.pdf is the online supplementary files that includes additional information on the datasets used such as the codebook for did_elections_final.csv and robustness tests.