Political Science

Why does America vote as it does on Election Day? The mission of the American National Election Studies (ANES) is to inform explanations of election outcomes by providing data that support rich hypothesis testing, maximize methodological excellence, measure many variables, and promote comparisons across people, contexts, and time. The ANES serves this mission by providing researchers with a view of the political world through the eyes of ordinary citizens.

A leading source of scholarly research and current data about women’s political participation in the United States

An in-depth guide to historical election data.

This is the new platform for accessing recent Census Bureau data. FYI, the Census Bureau stopped releasing new data in American FactFinder (AFF) at the end of June 2019 and transitioned to data.census.gov for data releases formerly on AFF.

Browse data sets by topic, or search the data catalog. You can limit your results to geospatial data sets. Federal and non-federal (state, county, municipal, etc.) data sources are available.

General Social Survey (GSS) contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings.

Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) provides demographic and historical research using U.S. Census microdata. They do request that you "Use it for GOOD -- never for EVIL".

An in-depth guide to polling data sites from Columbia University Libraries.

Gallup Polls conducts public opinion polls on political, social, and economic issues.

Pew Research Center is a think tank that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research.

For more than 50 years, Freedom House has systematically tracked the most pressing threats to democracy and freedom around the globe.

UN Data provides statistical time series for countries from around the world covering a wide range of economic and socio-demographic topics. It includes descriptions of the international sources and definitions used in compiling the data.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is an unique 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.

The DataBank is a compilation of a number of World Bank data products, the most significant one being World Development Indicators. It includes time series data from as early as 1960.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for over 200 countries and territories over the period 1996–2020, for six dimensions of governance: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. They are based on over 30 individual data sources produced by a variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms.

Housed at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard. Claims to host the world's largest collection of social science research. It holds data from many researchers and institutions in addition to Harvard.

Huge compilation of political and economic datasets by Erik Gahner