Political science, governance, and international affairs: Aggregate data

New portal to data and digital media published by the US. Census Bureau. Searchable, downloadable, with extensive user help. Replaces American FactFinder portal.

The Historical Statistics of the United States (HSUS) Millennial Edition Online provides data on social, behavioral, humanistic, and natural sciences including history, economics, government, finance, sociology, demography, education, law, natural resources, climate, religion, international migration, and trade - quantitative facts of American history.

Portal to data compiled by many US federal agencies. Browse by topic from the landing page or access the searchable data catalog from the Data menu at the top of the page. Files may be in TXT, HTML, XLS, CSV. or other formats.

• See the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology (FCSM) site for technical standards and guidelines behind the federal data.

MCDC's Uexplore web application provides access to the Missouri Census Data Center's public data archive, which features US Census and other public data. Files in the archive can be either database files (data tables comprised of rows/observations and columns/variables in a special format) or non-database (mostly metadata, special navigational index pages, or sometimes original raw input files) in a variety of common formats.

NCCS is a national clearinghouse of data on the nonprofit sector in the United States. This open-access version of NCCS Webster contains a variety of tools and reports to help you learn more about the nonprofit sector: find a nonprofit organization in your area, view IRS Form 990 images, analyze financial data on the sector, look at trends in charitable giving, or download data.

Tabular data from the US Council of State Governments' annual The Book of the States, state performance comparisons, and infographics

CEASED PUBLICATION. Annual compilation formerly published by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at UVa provided Detailed profiles of counties and cities are provided. Employment and income statistics by area, taxation figures by local governments, population and demographics, industry profiles, and other economic drivers are all detailed in report and data sets.

Provides regional demographic, economic and community health data with annotated graphs and tables, which are hotlinked to original sources at the state or national level. Data are for Floyd, Giles, Montgomery, and Pulaski Counties and the city of Radford, typically covering the most recent five years. The NRV Dashboard is maintained by the New River Valley Regional Commission.

Maps of current congressional districts; tables of returns for post-WWII general and primary elections for president, governor, senator, and representative. Online coverage begins with vol 31 (2013-14). Use print volumes for vols 1-30 (1956-2012), call number JK1967 .A8.

Narrative and tables on parties and elections, public opinion, branches of government, federalism, and public policy. Published in odd-numbered years. VT Library has print versions from 1994 and 2003 (call number JK274 .S74).

"USAFacts is a new data-driven portrait of the American population, our government’s finances, and government’s impact on society. We are a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative and have no political agenda or commercial motive. We provide this information as a free public service and are committed to maintaining and expanding it in the future." Relies on on publicly available data sources from all levels of government, but does not break out data for individual states or localities. Partners include the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and, the Penn Wharton Budget Model. USAFacts is a project of Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO.

Directory to world and regional statistical sources, national data, maps, rankings. Arranged by country name and by topic. Includes links to national statistical agencies. Easy to use to discover data, but you should find corroboration elsewhere, as this free version hides sources of individual tables behind a subscription paywall..

Very extensive directory of governmental and intergovernmental statistical agencies, with links though no annotations, from Wikipedia.

Portal to data, reports, and explanations of methodologies from UN divisions and official statistics produced by countries. Menus across top of the landing page permit browsing by topic or data project (notably UNData) Domains include agriculture, crime, education, energy, industry, labor, national accounts, population, and tourism. You can also find indicators such as Sustainable Development Goals. Data can be downloaded in statistical software formats and bulk-downloaded via API.

"The mission of Our World in Data is to make data and research on the world’s largest problems understandable and accessible." Leverage interpretative essays and data visualizations of very long run trends in policy problems to inform your own (re)search. Broadly organized around the UN Global Sustainability goals, themes include health, food provision, the growth and distribution of incomes, violence, rights, wars, culture, energy use, education, and environmental changes.
Produced by the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development at the University of Oxford.

Macroeconomic and financial data, outlooks, and reports from the IMF. Searchable; many browsing options by country, indicator,and publication type. Bulk download via an API is available (requires sign-in).
Entire IMF eLibrary will become open access on Jan 1, 2020.

The World Bank's Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog lists available World Bank datasets, pre-formatted tables, reports, and other resources. Microdata library facilitates access to data collected through sample surveys of households, business establishments, population, housing or agricultural censuses, or through administrative data collection processes.

PWT is a database of information on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity, with country and period coverage depending on the release. Maintained by University of California, Davis, and University of Groningen; originated at the University of Pennsylvania (and not to be confused with business data from Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS).)

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is an intergovernmental organization that gathers "information on a broad range of topics to help governments foster prosperity and fight poverty through economic growth and financial stability."

• OECD Data focuses on compilations and data an publications using OECD information.
• OECD.Stat provides data in tables, mostly for national-level comparison, that can be queried, exported, and visualized.

Portal to MPI's narrative reports, policy briefs, fact sheets, media, and maps as well as numerical data on immigration and migration and policies affecting them. Browse by topic or world region.

• MPI's Immigration Data Matters is an essential, annotated directory (PDF) that links users to more than 220 data sources, organized by topic and region, and offers tips on how to access more complicated datasets.

Historical Collection consists of over 90,000 digitized issues from Statistics Canada titles from the 19th to the early 21st century that were originally published in print, including the Canada Year Book, The Daily, Canadian Social Trends, and the Consumer Price Index.

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.)