This exercise is based on: Jones, Benjamin F, and Benjamin A Olken. 2009. Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 1(2): 55–87.
One longstanding debate in the study of international relations concerns the question of whether individual political leaders can make a difference. Some emphasize that leaders with different ideologies and personalities can significantly affect the course of a nation. Others argue that political leaders are severely constrained by historical and institutional forces. Did individuals like Hitler, Mao, Roosevelt, and Churchill make a big difference? The difficulty of empirically testing these arguments stems from the fact that the change of leadership is not random and there are many confounding factors to be adjusted for.
In this exercise, we consider a natural experiment in which the success or failure of assassination attempts is assumed to be essentially random.
You can check the data by running:
library(qss) and then
data("leaders",package = "qss")