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first_take What is unique about Austria?

A tough question - there are many things coming to my mind - but nothing can be expressed in (quantitative) data (or how would you guys describe 'Apfelstrudel' in numbers?). Also I found it hard to have this task without any specific direction of querying all kinds of data sources.

Starting thoughts
So I thought about possible options:
    - media concentration
    - corruption
    - anything about landscape (mountains? forests? ...)
    
I guess Austria simply is mediocre in many ways; except for the first issue, media concentration.
I know about that already, so it would have been weird to just prove that from different sources.

Looking for Data
Thus, I followed different tracks on the following datasets (using the international links on http://www.data.gov/opendatasites#anchor):
    - UN (http://data.un.org/Default.aspx)
    - OECD (http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/statistics)
    - World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/)
    - http://www.correlatesofwar.org/ (@Tom: thanks for the hint)
    
strolling around until I found infos on the World Religion Project (WRP; on correlates of war; Bibliography Entry: Zeev Maoz and Errol A. Henderson. “The World Religion Dataset, 1945-2010: Logic, Estimates, and trends.” International Interactions, 39(3).)
and found it interesting enough to finally check it out more intensely.

Reading/Processing
As a real beginner in this field I imported the csv-file to MS excel (yep, my bad, I do have libreoffice as well, but found it more convenient with excel..) and started deleting columns I found irrelevant for my quest/ion and filtered according to one specific year (2010) to have more contemporary results and found: nothing really. only, the total percentage of religious people seemed rather low compared to my expectations.

So I reorganized the spreadsheet and saw that Austria comes 10th in a ranking of the 'least religious' countries in the world, among many small and island states like Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica and so on. Barbados (86,11%), Slovenia (89%) and Jamaica (89,98%) come to lead this ranking.

This led me to the following answer to the question:
Despite its strong christian tradition, among all middle european countries, Austria is the 'least religious' one. According to the WRP only 93.27 % of the Austrian population are religious in any way (73% catholic, 4,75% islamic, 6,73% other religions) and 15,42% are non-religious. (The sum resulting in more than 100% may probably stem from dual religions, as mentioned in the Authors' codebook!?)

Trouble-sum
- It already took some time to find a relevant dataset. Without any specific idea about the direction of research it gave me a hard time. Finally COW helped me out (Maybe it'd have been easier to work on a country I don't know so well?)
- The dataset should include all countries worldwide to justify the 'uniqueness'..
- The provided codebook on COW helped a lot to understand the single categories
- Tom already mentioned the missing licensing on the COW page; at least the site states "we are committed to the free public release of data sets to the research community" (http://www.correlatesofwar.org/)
- Excel did a strange thing in listing numbers within one category; while all ratio (totalreligious/pop.) numbers below 1 were ranked correctly, all values above 1 were ranked as if below 0.86 - So I've almost overlooked that and still can't figure out the cause.


All in all it was a quite challenging task and it took me much longer than 30 minutes. Still, I guess, next time it would work out much faster.. ;-)


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Second take:
    
    http://www.cmfe.eu/60-uncategorised/206-first-country-ranking-of-community-media
    http://www.internetworldstats.com/eu/at.htm
    http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx
    http://www.statistik.at/web_en/statistics/information_society/ict_usage_in_households/index.html
    http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_SDDS/en/isoc_bde15c_esms.htm
    http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/statistics/search_database