.png){kind=icon}
Datasets:
The following is a list of publicly available datasets for researching various topics in Politics and International Relations. While most of the datasets can be downloaded immediately, a few require either registration or a request to access the data. It should be noted that these datasets come in various formats (Stata, SPSS, R, CVS). It is recommended that students familiarize themselves with the methodology involved in collecting the data and coding it prior to using the data.
- Political Contention
UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset 1946–2014
The Department of Peace and Conflict Research at the University of Uppsala has collaborated with the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute to produce a conflict dataset with information on armed conflict (internal and external) per year since 1946. The latest version covers the time between 1946 and 2014.
https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/
The Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD)
The Robert R. Strauss Centre at the University of Texas, Austin has developed a dataset on various types of conflicts such as protests, riots and strikes in Africa, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
https://www.strausscenter.org/scad.html
The Global Digital Activism Dataset
The Department of Communication at the University of Washington in Seattle has founded the Digital Activism Research Project in 2012, which involves amongst others, the construction of an event dataset of incidents in which digital media has been used for political activism.
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/34625/summary
Beyond The Hashtags Twitter Data
The Centre for Media and Social Impact at American University in Washington DC have made a dataset of over 40 million Tweets available from their project Beyond the Hashtags. These Tweets include 45 keywords related to the Black Lives Matter movement.
http://dfreelon.org/2017/01/03/beyond-the-hashtags-twitter-data/
- Public Opinion and Social Attitudes
There are various open access datasets for measuring public attitudes across the globe online. Some relevant ones are the Euro, Latino, Afro, Asian, and Arab barometers. These ask various policy-relevant questions, such as evaluation of the economy and the political regime, trust in political institutions, political participation and democratic values, amongst others. The World Values Survey on the other hand, focuses more narrowly on social attitudes towards various issues like gender, religion, democracy, and ethnic minorities.
http://www.asianbarometer.org/ (a request has to be made to access the data)
http://ec.europa.eu/COMMFrontOffice/publicopinion/index.cfm
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/raw-data.php - Latin American Public Opinion Project AmericasBarometer
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp
The Pew Research Centre, a think tank based in Washington DC, shares many datasets from surveys on a range of topics. These are usually surveys of public opinion in the USA—including the American trends panel - but there are also some global or comparative surveys. Register for a free account to download datasets and accompanying information such as survey questions.
https://www.pewresearch.org/download-datasets/ https://www.pewresearch.org/american-trends-panel-datasets/
- Elections
The British Election Study
The British Election Study is a project that started in 1964 and which involves conducting a survey immediately after each general election, to understand election outcomes, voting behaviour, and how party support change over time in Britain. This includes surveys on the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/data/#.WEBSOIdo1zk
- International Organizations
The IMF Monitor project collects data on IMF conditionality (the conditions placed on IMF loans to different countries) and IMF policy on advice to developing countries on managing capital flows. Their datasets and codebooks are available on their website, and you can also use their tool for searching for key terms in IMF Article IV reports.
http://www.imfmonitor.org/datasets.html
https://articleivscanner.imfmonitor.org/
The UN Data website shares statistics on a range of topics, such as tourism, crime, and environmental issues.
The OECD Factbook statistics database has information on OECD countries on a range of topics, such as globablization and migration. Data is currently available from 2005 to 2016.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/data/oecd-factbook-statistics_factbook-data-en
The EU Open Data Portal hosts surveys commissioned by the European Parliament, in addition to data from Eurobarometer surveys.
http://data.europa.eu/euodp/data/publisher/ep
There are also data sets relating to other issues and EU institutions here. http://data.europa.eu/euodp/data/
- Government data
Data.gov.uk allows you to search for data published by central government, local authorities, and public bodies.
- Media
Ofcom (Office of Communications) make their datasets available on a range of topics, including media use and attitudes among UK citizens.