Data Resources

Websites listed below contain political science data. 

This list is not meant to be exhaustive; it lists the more commonly used and useful sites. 

• Elections
• International
• Military
• Public Opinion
• Terrorism
• Voting
• Voting and Elections

Elections

• Global Elections Database -Provides information on the results of national and sub-national elections around the world.

 

• Constituency-Level Elections Archive - The central aim of the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) project is to produce a repository of detailed results - including votes received by each candidate/party, total votes cast, number of eligible voters, and seat figures where available - at a constituency level for the lower house legislative elections that have been conducted around the world.  Requires registration.

 

International

• Pew Global Attitudes Project Key Indicators - This interactive database allows users to explore public opinion trends in 55 countries on topics ranging from attitudes toward the U.S. to people's assessments of their own lives to views about globalization, democratization, extremism and other important issues.

• Uppsala Conflict Data Program - UCDP provides one of the most accurate and well-used data-sources on global armed conflicts and its definition of armed conflict is becoming a standard in how conflicts are systematically defined and studied.

• World Values Survey - The World Values Survey is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It is conducted by a network of social scientist at leading universities all around world. Interviews have been carried out with nationally representative samples of the publics of more than 80 societies on all six inhabited continents.

 

Military

• SIPRI Military Expenditure Database - The SIPRI Military Expenditure Database consistent time series on the military spending of 171 countries since 1988.

 

Public Opinion

• The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research - Public opinion datasets.  Some data freely available; some requires a fee/subscription.

 

Terrorism

• Global Terrorism Database - The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2012 (with annual updates planned for the future). Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on domestic as well as international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes more than 113,000 cases.

• Terrorism & Preparedness Data Resource Center - TPDRC archives and distributes data collected by government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and researchers about the nature of intra- (domestic) and international terrorism incidents, organizations, perpetrators, and victims; governmental and nongovernmental responses to terror, including primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions; and citizen's attitudes towards terrorism, terror incidents, and the response to terror.

 

Voting

• IDEA - The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance is an intergovernmental organization that has collected and produced a number of information databases on different areas of democracy and elections worldwide.

 

Voting and Elections

 

• National Election Studies - High quality data on voting, public opinion, and political participation.  Requires registration.

• The Record of American Democracy, 1984-1990 - Data include election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic measures of the American public at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation.

 

Image source:  Presidential signatures.  Public domain.  Wikimedia Commons.