erikgahner.dk
A dataset with political datasets #3
estimated reading time: 1 min A few years ago I wrote a post about the updates I had made to my dataset with political datasets. Back then, there were more than 500 datasets in the dataset. Today, there are more than 600 datasets. Here is an overview of the categories within the datasets. We still see that a lot of the datasets are related to international relations (e.g., data on conflict and democracy), followed by survey data on public opinion (i.e., the political attitudes and behaviours of citizens). In general, there is a lot of variation in the type of data, topics, time periods and regions covered (though there is still a bias towards more recent data from Western countries). Since my previous post a few years ago, I have made some additions to the repository beyond adding more datasets. First, I have added links to a series of Harvard Dataverses related to political science journals. As I mentioned in a blog post five years ago, several journals have their own dataverse where they archive datasets well in advance of the actual publication of papers. This is a good resource for finding (new) data. Second, I have added links to a series of R packages that either include political data directly or provide an API to access data in R. These packages might especially be relevant for teaching purposes to get students to work with real-life political data in R without requiring users to download and import the data. Third, I have added more license-specific information, both to the repository itself and for the datasets in the overview. For the repository license, I have added a CC0 1.0 Universal license, meaning you can use the repository for almost any purpose (commercial or private). For the individual datasets, there is now a column providing information on the license of the dataset. This is still being updated so not a lot of datasets are covered yet. As always, feel free to suggest edits to the repository (either in the form of issues or pull requests), especially if you are aware of political datasets not currently included in the overview. You can find the repository here.
