Awesome Democracy Data

A curated list of awesome data sources related to elections, electoral reforms, and democratic political systems.

If you'd like to recommend any data sources for inclusion, feel free to create an issue or discussion, or even a pull request!

Topics

• 🏛️ Systems of government
• 🗳️ Election results
• 📖 Legislative records
• 🎏 Political parties
• 🏁 Election campaigns
• ☎️ Polling & survey data
• ⚖️ Election laws & reforms
• 📦 Packaged datasets
• Miscellaneous

🏛️ Systems of government

• 🌐 presidential powers and regime type (by André Borges) - The dataset of presidential powers covers 49 democracies with elected presidents, in addition to a handful of parliamentary countries where presidents have more than ceremonial powers.

🗳️ Election results

• 🇺🇸 MIT Election Data + Science Lab - By applying scientific principles to how elections are studied and administered, MEDSL aims to improve the democratic experience for all U.S. voters.
  • U.S. House 1976-2018 - Constituency (district) returns for elections to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1976 to 2018.
  • U.S. Senate 1976-2018 - Constituency (state-level) returns for elections to the U.S. Senate from 1976 to 2018.
  • U.S. President 1976-2016 - Cnstituency (state-level) returns for elections to the U.S. presidency from 1976 to 2016.
  • Voting and Election Science Team (University of Florida, Wichita State University) - an effort to collect nationwide precinct data.
• 🌐 Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) - The Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) is a repository of detailed election results at the constituency level for lower chamber and upper chamber legislative elections from around the world. Our motivation is to preserve and consolidate these valuable data in one comprehensive and reliable resource that is ready for analysis and publicly available at no cost. This public good is expected to be of use to a range of audiences for research, education, and policy-making.
  • CLEA Lower Chamber Elections Archive - The dataset currently includes around 1,900 elections from 170 countries and territories.
  • CLEA Upper Chamber Elections Archive - The dataset currently includes 125 elections from 13 countries.
  • GeoReferenced Electoral Districts - The GRED datasets are geo-referenced maps for electoral districts in countries from the CLEA Lower Chamber elections archive. The goal of this project is to offer maps formatted in a manner so they can be linked to other standard geo-referenced data, allowing researchers to test a variety of research questions at a subnational level.
  • Party Nationalization Measures - The party nationalization datasets contain the effective number of parties, as well as several measures of party nationalization, at three different levels of aggregation: the national level, the party level, and the constituency level. They are provided for both the Lower Chamber and Upper Chamber elections results.
• 🌐 Election Passport - Election Passport provides free access to a rich dataset of constituency election results in 110 countries and territories throughout the world. The data are unusually complete, including votes won by very small parties, independents, and frequently candidate names, that are difficult to locate. Additional elections are regularly added. Lower House results are on this page, while upper house results are on the Senates page. Election Passport also presents information on the operation of Electoral Systems as well as results from Regional Elections for selected countries.
• 🌐 Global Elections Database - The Global Elections Database (formerly known as the Constituency-Level Elections Dataset, 2007) provides information on the results of both national and subnational elections around the world. These data are presented at two levels of analysis, allowing users to quickly identify the results of elections within a country as a whole or within particular constituencies or districts of a country. All parties are included in the database regardless of the number of votes that they won. The data are based on countries' official election results and have been amassed from various government institutions.
• 🌐 Psephos - An archive of electoral data maintained by Adam Carr: "The largest, most comprehensive and most up-to-date archive of electoral information in the world, with election statistics from 182 countries. Use the alphabetical index at left to find information about every country in the world."
• 🇺🇸 Tufts Digital Library: Electoral Datasets - A collection of US state-level election records.
• 🇺🇸 OpenElections - The goal of OpenElections is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election results data for the United States.
• 🇮🇳 datameet/india-election-data - To map publicly available datasets related to General Assembly (Lok Sabha) elections in India.
• 🇰🇪 mikelmaron/kenya-election-data - Data useful for election mapping in Kenya. This data comes from http://vote.iebc.or.ke/. There are simple endpoints for requesting json encoded data. download.py iterates, caches, and builds the output.
• 🌐 Voter Turnout Database - The Voter Turnout Database is the best resource for a wide array of statistics on voter turnout from around the world. It contains the most comprehensive global collection of voter turnout statistics from presidential and parliamentary elections since 1945. Always growing, the database also includes European Parliament elections, as presented by country using both the number of registered voters and voting age population as indicators, and in some cases the data includes statistics on spoilt ballot rate. The easy-to-use database allows you to search for data by country or field, and even download all the data from the database in one file.

📖 Legislative records

• 🇺🇸 Voteview - Voteview allows users to view every congressional roll call vote in American history on a map of the United States and on a liberal-conservative ideological map including information about the ideological positions of voting Senators and Representatives.
• 🇺🇸 LegiScan National Legislative Datasets - Weekly snapshots of session data are created each Sunday morning with updated information on an as-needed basis. Provided in simple comma-separated values files for general bill data, or the most complete form packaged as LegiScan API JSON payloads.
• 🇨🇦 Poltext - The main goal of the Poltext project is to collect textual data sources used for policy analysis in Canada, to record the data using a variety of recognized coding methods, and to give researchers free access to the scientific knowledge thus accumulated.
• 🇺🇸 openstates - Track bills, review upcoming legislation, and see how your local representatives are voting in your state. Open States aggregates legislative information from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. This information is then standardized, cleaned, and published to the public via OpenStates.org, a powerful API, and bulk downloads.
• 🇺🇸 unitedstates - A shared commons of data and tools for the United States. Made by the public, used by the public.
  • congress-legislators - Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML/JSON/CSV, as well as committees, presidents, and vice presidents.
  • uscode - A working parser for the US Code's hierarchy, and a work-in-progress parser for the full content.
  • districts - GeoJSON and other shape files for the federal legislative districts of the US.

🎏 Political parties

• 🌐 Party Facts - Party Facts links datasets on political parties and provides an online platform about parties and their history as recorded in social science datasets.
• 🌐 Varieties of Democracy V-Party Dataset - Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
• 🌐 Political Party Database Project - The Political Party Database Project is a multi-country collaborative effort to advance the study of party-based representative democracy. The first round of data, which encompasses 19 countries and 122 political parties, was released in January 2017.
• 🌐 Manifesto Project - The Manifesto Project provides the scientific community with parties’ policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties’ electoral manifestos. It covers over 1000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents.

🏁 Election campaigns

• 🇺🇸 FEC - Downloadable bulk data files contain data from statements and reports filed with the Commission in a form that may be useful to users performing in-depth campaign finance research. The files, which were previously located on the Commission's file transfer protocol (FTP) server, can be very large because they contain transaction-level data. The update schedule of these files varies from daily to weekly.
• 🇺🇸 Open Secrets - The Center for Responsive Politics is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
• 🇺🇸 FollowTheMoney.org - The Institute researches and archives a 50-state federal/state database of contributions documenting $100+ billion, plus more than 2 million state lobbyist-client relationships that are registered annually. Recent expansions include selected local-level data, collecting independent spending reports for federal campaigns and in 31 states, and lobbying spending in 20 states.

☎️ Polling & survey data

• 🇺🇸 Voter Study Group - The data shared here derive from the VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) starting in 2016 and weekly Democracy Fund and UCLA Nationscape surveys spanning July 2019 to December 2020. These data form the basis for Voter Study Group analysis and reporting and are available for use by other scholars and journalists interested in engaging the public in meaningful conversations.

⚖️ Election laws & reforms

• 🌐 Electoral System Design Database - The Electoral System Design Database provides comparative data on electoral systems used in 217 countries and territories across the globe. Compared to other similar datasets, this expansive international coverage makes this database the most comprehensive source of information in the elections field. Interactive tools, including maps and graphs, allow users to easily compare regions and sub-regions, filter necessary data and export raw data for further analyses. Country pages provide in depth country level data in a historical format.
• 🇺🇸 State Elections Legislation Database - This database contains state legislation related to the administration of elections introduced in 2011 through this year, 2020.
• 🇺🇸 Planscore - PlanScore presents estimates of the efficiency gap, partisan bias, and the mean-median difference for congressional and state legislative district plans dating back to 1972. Simon Jackman, Eric McGhee, and Nicholas Stephanopoulos compiled these estimates in their academic and litigation-related work.

📦 Packaged datasets

These are collections of datasets embedded in R or Python packages.

• 📦 elliottmorris/politicaldata - An R package for acquiring and analyzing political data — including polls, election results, legislator information, and demographic data.
• 📦 psData - This R package includes functions for gathering commonly used and regularly maintained political science data sets. It also includes functions for combining components from these data sets into variables that have been suggested in the political science literature, but are not regularly updated.
• 📦 🇧🇷 silvadenisson/electionsBR - electionsBR offers a set of functions to easily pull and clean Brazilian electoral data from the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court (TSE) website. Among others, the package retrieves data on local and federal elections for all positions (city councilor, mayor, state deputy, federal deputy, governor, and president) aggregated by state, city, and electoral zones.

🛠️ Miscellaneous

These are miscellaneous tools, git repositories and organizations that contain datasets and/or tools for retrieving, manipulating and analyzing data related to electoral systems.

• MEDSL - MIT Election Data and Science Lab
• FiveThirtyEight - Data and code behind the articles and graphics at FiveThirtyEight, including polling and election forecast data.