American politics & government

IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation makes it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community context. Data and services available free of charge.

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, aims to compile and make available statistics at European level that enable comparisons between countries and regions. Eurostat coordinates the statistical activities of the institutions and bodies of the Union, in particular with a view to ensuring consistency and quality of the data and minimising reporting burden.

Create downloadable, country-level reports drawing on 200 indicators to track how different societies perform along six indicess of social development. The indices allow estimating the effects of social development for a large range of countries on indicators like economic growth, human development, and governance.

Visualizations to compare countries in more than two-dozen categories, drawing on a vast compilation of data from hundreds of sources.

Data about policymakers rather than citizens. CAP monitors policy processes by tracking the actions that governments take in response to the challenges they face, classifying policy activities into a single, universal and consistent coding scheme. These activities can take many different forms, including debating a problem, delivering speeches, (eg, the Queen’s speech in the United Kingdom), holding hearings, introducing or enacting laws (eg, Bills and Public Laws in the United States) or issuing judicial rulings (eg, rulings from the European Court of Justice).

Research guide from Princeton University identifies many open-access repositories of election data at the global, regional, and national levels

Free resource. Election Passport provides free access to a rich dataset of constituency election results in over 100 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.

Free resource. 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. The data are accessible in multiple formats: spreadsheets; tables; GIS maps.

• Access to these data requires you to createa free, personal account, which then allows you to save customized datasets for future reference and to receive automatic updates to the data when they become available.

Free resource. Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) is a repository of detailed election results at the constituency level for lower house legislative elections from around the world. Purpose 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 for research, education, and policy-making.

Clearinghouse for datasets that can fuel studies on US elections at all levels.

• Tools + Resources section lists open data sources recommended by MEDSL
• Research section offers "explainers" and academic papers

Member of Harvard Dataverse project.

Comprehensive libguide from MSU Libraries provides general rules for data citation, with examples for citing datasets and tabular data in principal style manuals used in social science.

ATI is a new approach to connecting readers of qualitative and mixed-methods research to the underlying data, such as those curated by the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University. ATI facilitates transparency by allowing scholars to “annotate” specific passages in an article. Annotations amplify the text and, when possible, include a link to one or more data sources underlying a claim; data sources are housed in a repository. (VT's institutional membership in the QDR is provided by the University Libraries.)

ANES has aimed since 1948 to provide data that support rich hypothesis testing about American voting behavior, maximize methodological excellence, measure many variables, and promote comparisons across people, contexts, and time. variable search tool, informational guides and ANES study reports.

GSS gathers data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends and constants in attitudes, behaviors, and attributes. The GSS contains a standard core of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest, such as civil liberties, crime and violence, intergroup tolerance, morality, national spending priorities, psychological well-being, social mobility, and stress and traumatic events. Hundreds of trends have been tracked since 1972. In addition, since the GSS adopted questions from earlier surveys, trends can be followed for up to 70 years. Datasets may be downloaded or analyzed online with GSS Data Explorer

Odom Institute's collection of regional and state polls and also the Louis Harris Data Center.