Political Science & Peace and Conflict Studies Subject Guide

Mid Sweden University / Mittuniversitetet
The Institute of Democracy conducts research about democratic development and political communication between citizens, media and parties.

The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance is an intergovernmental organization.
Its programmes aim to provide knowledge to democracy builders, policy development and analysis and support democratic reform.

University of California, Irvine. The center sponsors research and education aimed at improving the democratic process in the United States and expanding democracy around the world.

A debate forum for issues concerning globalization, democracy and development etc.

Freedom House is an independent watchdog organization dedicated to the expansion of freedom around the World.

ElectionGuide is provided by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), an international non-profit dedicated to strengthening electoral democracy. National elections around the world and much more.

ParlGov contains data on elections and governments for all EU and most OECD members for the entire post-war period. The database combines approximately 1400 parties, 680 elections with 5800 election results and 2300 governing parties in 960 cabinets. This information is linked to various external data sources. Releases at regular intervals will provide up-to-date empirical information including recent elections or changes in government, coding suggestions from country experts as well as extensions to more countries and time periods.

Political Data Yearbook captures election results, national referenda, changes in government, and institutional reforms for a range of countries, within and beyond the EU.
Published on behalf of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR)

The European Journal of Political Research (EJPR) Political Data Yearbook documents election results, national referenda, changes in government, and institutional reforms. In addition, it recognized experts on the politics of each country provide commentary on these events, as well as on the principal issues in national politics during the year. Published in European Journal of Political Research.

The PARLINE database contains information on the structure and working methods of 271 parliamentary chambers in all of the 193 countries where a national legislature exists. IPU (Inter-Parliamentary Union)

The project is based on quantitative content analyses of parties’ election programs from more than 50 countries covering all free, democratic elections since 1945.

Chesdata estimate party positioning on European integration, ideology and policy issues for national parties in a variety of European countries.

The International IDEA Voter Turnout Website contains the a global collection of voter turnout statistics. Regularly updated voter turnout figures for national presidential and parliamentary elections since 1945, as well as European Parliament elections, are presented country by country using both the number of registered voters and voting age population (VAP) as indicators.

This collection is maintained by the Social Sciences and Humanities Library at UC San Diego. It contains resources on elections in the US and beyond. It includes various web and print resources in presidential, federal, state, local and world elections. Some of the resources are only available for students/staff at UC San Diego.

Svenska Nationell Datatjänst. Göteborgs Unv.

The Program is a research network of scholars interested in studies of electoral democracy, representative democracy, opinion formation, and voting behavior.
Gothenburg University

CSES is a collaborative program of research among election study teams from around the world. Participating countries include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies.

Constitute offers access to the world’s constitutions so that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics. Constitute was developed by the authors of the "Comparative Constitutions Project" at the University of Texas.

A project collecting global data about democracy. Distinguishes among 7 high-level Principles of Democracy: Electoral, Liberal, Participatory, Majoritarian, Consensual, Deliberative, and Egalitarian.
Disaggregates into dozens of lower-level Components of Democracy such as regular elections, judicial independence, direct democracy, and gender equality, and provides disaggregated indicators for each conception and each component.

Covers all countries (and some dependent territories) from 1900 to the present, whenever possible and provides an estimate of measurement reliability for each rating.

All ratings are public, free of charge.

The Polity IV dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system over the period 1800-2013 (i.e., states with a total population of 500,000 or more in the most recent year; currently 167 countries). With the support of the Political Instability Task Force, the Polity IV Project has been transformed into a living data collection effort, meaning that it constantly monitors regime changes in all major countries and provides annual assessments of regime authority characteristics, changes and data updates.

University of Gothenburg. QOGs objectives is to address the theoretical and empirical problem of how political institutions of high quality can be created and maintained, and to study the effects of Quality of Government on a number of policy areas, such as health, the environment, social policy, and poverty.

University of Bern. Collections of political and institutional data. It consists of (mostly) annual data, it might vary between the different datasets. Most data sets contains some additional demographic, socio- and economic variables.

The BTI analyzes and evaluates the quality of democracy, a market economy and political management in 129 developing and transition countries.

Here you will find reports on freedom in the World such as:
Freedom in the World - Freedom of the Press - Freedom on the Net - Nations in Transit - Countries at the Crossroads - Women's Rights in the Middle East and North Africa.

United Nations Development Program (UNDP)

An organization that map corruption in the World. For different indexes and publications, go to "What we do".

Reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 215 economies over the period 1996–2014, for six dimensions of governance.
World Bank Institute (WGI)

The Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index ranks the performance of 180 countries according to a range of criteria that include media pluralism and independence, respect for the safety and freedom of journalists, and the legislative, institutional and infrastructural environment in which the media operate.