Data on Policy, Society, Media

Updated: 17 July 2014

The GDELT Project (Google Ideas)

The GDELT Project monitors the world's broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages and identifies the people, locations, organizations, counts, themes, sources, and events driving our global society every second of every day, creating a free open platform for computing on the entire world. The GDELT Project is an initiative to construct a catalog of human societal-scale behavior and beliefs across all countries of the world, connecting every person, organization, location, count, theme, news source, and event across the planet into a single massive network that captures what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved, and how the world is feeling about it, every single day.

Data
Documentation

LIS Cross-National Data Center (The Luxembourg Income Study)

LIS is a cross-national data center which serves a global community of researchers, educators, and policy makers. LIS acquires datasets with income, wealth, employment, and demographic data from a large number of countries, harmonizes them to enable cross-national comparisons, and makes them available for public use by providing registered users with remote access. Our mission is to enable, facilitate, promote, and conduct cross-national comparative research on socio-economic outcomes and on the institutional factors that shape those outcomes.

Data
Working Papers

RULERS Worldwide (B. Schemmel)

This site contains lists of heads of state and heads of government (and, in certain cases, de facto leaders not occupying either of those formal positions) of all countries and territories, going back to about 1700 in most cases. Also included are the subdivisions of various countries (the links are at the bottom of the respective country entries), as well as a selection of international organizations. Recent foreign ministers of all countries are listed separately.

Leaders of International Organizations

Religious Leaders

Key Policy Data (USA) (Public Choice Analytics, Visigov)

Visualizing of data to promote better public policies in the United States of America.

Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2013
(M. G. Marshall / T. R. Gurr, Societal-Systems Research Inc., University of Maryland)

The research described in the Polity IV Project was sponsored by the Political Instability Task Force (PITF).
The PITF is funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The views expressed herein are the author's/authors' alone and do not represent the views of the US Government.

Vote World (Berkeley University, Institutions and Governance Program, USA)

Datasets of roll-call voting from legislative bodies throughout the international community. Data for the United States House of Representative and Senate (assembled by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal), from the European Parliament (assembled by Simon Hix, Abdul Noury, and Gerard Roland), from the United Nations (assembled by Erik Voeten), and many more legislative bodies are contained in this website.

American Housing Survey (Public Choice Analytics, Visigov)

The American Housing Survey (AHS) is sponsored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The survey is the most comprehensive national housing survey in the United States.

How Dark Money Flows Through the Koch Network (Pro Publica Tools & Data)

Research on fundraising by the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch which supports a tangle of nonprofits in the United States, all aimed at advancing conservative causes.

Donations to Priorities USA Action (OpenSecrets.org)

Priorities USA Action is the top liberal super PAC supporting President Obama in the 2012 election. The group was founded in April 2011 by two of Obama's former White House aides, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeny, in an effort to counter the effects of big-spending super PACs on the right.

Global Economic Outlook (GEO) Database (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Development Policy and Analysis Division)

The Global Economic Outlook (GEO) database contains selected macroeconomic indicators from the analysis and projections reported in the World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP). The WESP is released in January and an update is released in June each year.

World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) Report

World Economic and Social Survey (WESS) (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Development Policy and Analysis Division)

The survey examines the many challenges that must be addressed to achieve sustainable development. The survey zooms in on three critical challenges – food security, energy transformation and sustainable cities. New strategies are needed to address the impacts of rapid urbanization around the world, including increasing demands for energy, water, sanitation, public services, education and health.

World Economic and Social Survey (WESS) Report

World Values Survey (WVS) (The World Values Survey Association)

The survey, which started in 1981, seeks to use the most rigorous, high-quality research designs in each country. The WVS consists of nationally representative surveys conducted in almost 100 countries which contain almost 90 percent of the world’s population, using a common questionnaire. The WVS is the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, currently including interviews with almost 400,000 respondents. Moreover the WVS is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones.

Online Data Analysis