Library Guides: Political Science: Statistics and Data

Statistics

Census
Find data and statistics on demographics, disability, fertility and family, foreign trade, housing, foreign born, income, poverty and other factors.
Freedom House
Freedom House has been advocating for global freedom since 1941. Provides a number of reports, data and statistics on state of freedom, civil liberties, press freedom around the world.
International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) Table 3B: Political Risk Points by Component, 1984-2009
Table 3B provides annual averages of the components of ICRG's Political Risk Ratings (Table 3B) as published in the International Country Risk Guide since 1984.
Migration Policy Institute
The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute seeks to improve immigration and integration policies through authoritative research and analysis, opportunities for learning and dialogue, and the development of new ideas to address complex policy questions.
Politics That Work
Resource for finding hard data to enable you to decide which party's policies are actually playing out better. A wide variety of infographics and graphs that package reliable, objective, publicly available information about the parties' track records into formats which we hope make the patterns in the data clear.
Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1878-2012
Transparency International
Transparency International gives voice to the victims and witnesses of corruption. We work together with governments, businesses and citizens to stop the abuse of power, bribery and secret deals. Transparency means shedding light on shady deals, weak enforcement of rules and other illicit practices that undermine good governments, ethical businesses and society at large. Includes corruption information by topic or country.
Vital Statistics on American Politics (1990-2006, 2013/2014)

Historical Statistics of the United States
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Statistical Abstract of the United States

Bureau of Justice Statistics
Department of Justice federal crime statistics released as searchable data.
State Agencies Database Project
Collection of agency databases for each state.
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
SDGs are targets for global development adopted in September 2015, set to be achieved by 2030. All countries of the world have agreed to work towards achieving these goals. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals are defined in a list of 169 SDG Targets. Progress towards these Targets is agreed to be tracked by 232 unique Indicators.
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)
An international, collaborative research project that aims "to produce new indicators of democracy for all countries since 1900." Visitors to this ambitious project will find a number of interesting resources, including their annual democracy reports (currently available for 2017 and 2018)
World Bank
Has statistical information for each country, such as population, GDP, unemployment, political accountability, citizen engagement, trust, etc.

Data Portals

Data.gov
Data.gov is managed and hosted by the U.S. General Services Administration. Browse through types, tags, formats, groups, organization types, organizations, and categories. Once you find a dataset or tool of interest, click on the title and you will be taken to a page with more details on that specific dataset or tool.
Data Is Plural — Structured Archive
A curated list of datasets on a wide range of subjects.
Data Portals.org
List of data portals for cities, states and countries.
GDELT Project
Continually-updated dataset on news events occurring worldwide
Google dataset search
Harvard Dataverse
Harvard Dataverse is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data. Each individual dataverse is a customizable collections of datasets (or a virtual repository) for organizing, managing, and showcasing datasets.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
Open Science Data Cloud
Directory of Datasets of interest to physical, social, and computer scientists
Public Records resources
Collated by the Journalist's Toolbox.
Re3data.org
Large directory of datasets which are available at institutional repositories
U.S. Data Portals (Sunlight Foundation)
Find city and state data portals.
UK Data Archive
The UK's largest collection of digital research data in the social sciences and humanities.
UNData.org
A search engine for datasets produced by the United Nations
World Bank Open Data
These datasets were compiled for World Bank research and are provided free of cost to foster the creation of new knowledge.
USA.gov - Data and Statistics about the US
Many government agencies have statistical information on a wide range of topics.

Data Sets

The Accountability Project
Accountability Project curates, standardizes and indexes public data to give journalists, researchers and others a simple way to search across otherwise siloed records. Our collection includes over 913.9 million public records.
American National Election Studies
To serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists, the ANES produces high quality data from its own surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation.
CDC Wonder
Large collection of datasets on U.S. public health
Charles Stewart's Congressional Data Page
Links and citation info for multiple Congressional datasets.
Comparative Agendas Project
Data on policy changes in the United States since the Second World War.
Correlates of War
Correlates of War (COW) seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations.
GDELT Project
Continually-updated dataset on news events occurring worldwide
General Social Survey (NORC)
Since 1972, the General Social Survey (GSS) has provided politicians, policymakers, and scholars with a clear and unbiased perspective on what Americans think and feel about such issues as national spending priorities, crime and punishment, intergroup relations, and confidence in institutions.
International country risk guide
Provides political, economic, and financial risk ratings and forecasts for its universe of 140 developed, emerging, and frontier markets.
Mass Mobilization Project
The Mass Mobilization Project is “an effort to understand citizen movements against governments, what citizens want when they demonstrate against governments, and how governments respond to citizens.” The project’s dataset covers more than 14,000 protests in more than 160 countries between 1990 and early 2017. For each protest, it indicates the location, dates, estimated number of participants, protesters’ demands, the state’s response, and more.
Open States
From the Sunlight Foundation. Select a state to start to research bills, review voting records, contact elected officials and more. Bulk data downloads are available.
Pew Research Center
The Pew Research Center is a major center for the study of public opinion and regularly conducts polls (both at home and abroad) about various social and political topics and contemporary issues. They make many of their studies available for download here. Many of the more recent data files are in SPSS format. Users are required to register before downloading a dataset, but registration is free.
Public Records resources
Collated by the Journalist's Toolbox.
Quality of Government Institute
The QOG Institute at University of Gothenburg studies good governance and corruption on a global scale. QoG provides a range of datasets available for free, and data visualization tools. QoG Standard Dataset contains the most qualitative variables from the Standard Dataset. The QoG Expert Survey is a dataset based on our survey of experts on public administration around the world, available in an individual dataset and an aggregated dataset covering 107 countries.The QoG OECD dataset covers countries who are members of the OECD. The EU Regional Data consists of 450 variables from Eurostat and other sources, covering three levels of European regions - country, major socio-economic regions and basic regions for the application of regional policies.
Record of American Democracy (ROAD)
Data include election returns, socioeconomic summaries, and demographic measures of the American public at unusually low levels of geographic aggregation. The NSF-supported ROAD project covers every state in the country from 1984 through 1990 (including some off-year elections).
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is an international, collaborative research project that aims "to produce new indicators of democracy for all countries since 1900." Visitors to this ambitious project will find a number of interesting resources, including their annual democracy reports (currently available for 2017 and 2018); other publications (such as country reports and thematic reports); and a variety of analysis tools, such as interactive maps and motion charts. Social science researchers may be particularly interested in the V-Dem datasets, which (at the time of this write-up) include data for 201 countries and extend as far back as the year 1789 up to 2017. These datasets, which are released yearly around April, also include "450 V-Dem indicators, 47 mid-indices and 5 high-level indices," as well as documentation for each dataset and are available in formats such as SPSS, STATA, and Excel.

Political Science: Statistics and Data

Data Services Overview

Statistics

Data Portals

Data Sets