Asking for some geopolitical variables datasource

Question

Normally, we control for geography variables in some economic studies. However, in the study examining how well the government implements the laws and orders, my advisor told me that we can think of the "geopolitical variables".

From Reynaud(2008), geopolitic is

Geopolitics traditionally indicates the links and causal relationships between political power and geographic space; in concrete terms it is often seen as a body of thought assaying specific strategic prescriptions based on the relative importance of land power

I am wondering if there is any popular geopolitical variable in published resource?

In another word, "Geopolitics" is how geographical factor affects the national behaviors. More specific, geopolitic examines some factors as: geography, natural resources, population,... affects a country's foreign policy and the position of this country in international system

Some suggested me to think the data about "spending on the military, trade agreements, research agreements and size of trade relationships, voting power in international bodies, closeness of government systems, to which countries does a given country provide aid"

Answer 1

Quite a broad concept, but I would say databases such as V-Dem (varieties of democracy), QoG (quality of governance), DPI (database of political institutions) are all pretty comprehensive when it comes to looking and country-level political variables.

The above datasets contain information on population, resources, GDP, elections, etc.

If you are more interested in spatial information, conflict, etc., I would recommend PRIO, UCDP, and Polity IV. These all have good coverage of geo-referenced conflict events, and other useful spatial data (i.e. area of state, proximity to oceans, topography, trade, etc.).

It might well be the case that you will need to join these datasets together to get at all the variables you are interested in -- this can be done fairly easily in R or similar tools.