‘I can’t find any data!’

Forests and trees

Finding relevant data is one of the major hurdles students face during term paper or thesis projects — which is a bit puzzling given that there is a huge and growing amount of data about many political, social, or economic aspects freely available on the open internet.

This post provides a (definitely not exhaustive) list of datasets and data repositories that can be relevant for research projects in the social and political sciences. It is not the first such list (see below), but it complements other lists with a stronger focus on datasets from and relevant for research on welfare states.

Links to most data sources are provided, those without links should be easy to find. The list and links are updated every once in a while.

Other (better?) overviews over available data

Erik Gahner’s excellent Dataset of Political Datasets provides a great overview over datasets that are relevant for political science research, and there are also a number of data repositories and archives that contain even more (and partly older) data that might be relevant for some projects, for example:

• The GESIS survey data repository for survey data
• The Norwegian Norsk senter for forskningsdata (NSD) or Datafabrikken.

Survey data

General social survey data

• European Social Survey (ESS): https://europeansocialsurvey.org/
• International Social Survey Program (ISSP): https://issp.org/
• Eurobarometer: Public attitudes toward large range of topics; see https://www.gesis.org/en/eurobarometer-data-service/search-data-access/topics
• Arab Barometer: Public opinion data from MENA countries (https://www.arabbarometer.org/)
• World Values Survey (WVS)
• US General Social Survey (GSS)
• PEW polling data (partly avaiable for free, after registration): https://www.pewresearch.org/tools-and-resources/¹

Election/voter survey data

• Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (http://www.cses.org/): Standardized election surveys from several countries and elections
• American National Election Study (http://www.electionstudies.org/)
• Norwegian National Election Study/Norsk Valgundersøkelser (available via NSD; see above)
• US VOTER survey data: Unique longitudinal survey data allowing for deep exploration of public opinion on the issues and values that drive voter behavior.

Societal safety & crisis preparedness

• US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Household Survey: Representative survey data on the American public’s preparedness actions, attitudes, and motivations.
• Several Special Eurobarometer surveys from different years look at attitudes toward disaster prevention and civil protection: See https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/browse/all; search in Keywords for “Civil protection”; access data via GESIS’ ZACAT Data Archive (see above)
• The 2016 round of the International Social Survey Program (https://www.gesis.org/en/issp/modules/issp-modules-by-topic/role-of-government/2016) included questions on attitudes toward national security and anti-terror measures such as video surveillance or detention of terrorist suspects.

Other

• The Public Opinion Quarterly provides reviews of recent polling data on specific topics (e.g., De Boer 1983); search for “The Polls” or “Poll Reviews”
• Eurostat Survey Data: Includes e.g. the European Labour Force Survey (ELFS), European Community Household Panel (ECHP), European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC),…}
• Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)
• Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS): Survey data on the experiences of ethnic minorities in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic (see also Finney et al. 2023)
• Various national & international panel surveys (German SOEP, British BHPS, Swiss SHP, Swedish LNU, U.S. PSID, Japanese JHPS,…)

Cross-national comparative data

International organizations

• OECD: https://www.oecd.org/en/data.html
• World Bank: https://data.worldbank.org/
• IMF: https://www.imf.org/en/Data
• ILO: https://ilostat.ilo.org/
• Eurostat: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat
• UN: https://data.un.org/
• UNESCO: https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/
• UNHCR: https://www.unhcr.org/what-we-do/reports-and-publications/unhcr-data
• WHO: https://data.wto.org/en

Comparative politics: Governments, parliaments, parties, institutions, elections

• Manifesto Project Database: Ideological positions of political parties (https://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/)
• Integrated Party Organization Dataset (http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PE8TWP)
• PARTY FACTS: Repository of comparative and historical data on political parties in around 200 countries (https://partyfacts.herokuapp.com/)
• Parliament and government composition (PARLGOV; https://www.parlgov.org/) database
• Inter-Parliamentary Union: Qualitative descriptions of parliaments and electoral systems, and key statistics on the composition of parliaments in most countries of the world (https://www.ipu.org/)
• POLCON: Index of political constraints (“checks & balances”), information about heads of states, governments, government parties (https://mgmt.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/heniszpolcon/polcondataset/)
• Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM): Indicators of democracy, very detailed and for 177 countries between 1900 and today (https://www.v-dem.net/)
• Executive Approval Project: Cross-country comparative data on public support for political executives (http://www.executiveapproval.org/)
• Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2011 (see also Golder 2005; Bormann and Golder 2013)
• European Journal of Political Research Political Data Yearbook: Qualitative info on elections, government composition, important issues in national politics (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%292047-8852)
• International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA): Comparative (often qualitative) data on electoral systems, campaign finance rules, direct democracy, gender quotas, voter turnout,… (https://www.idea.int/)
• Global Leadership Project (GLP): Data on government leaders throughout the world - including legislators, members of the executive branch, members of the judiciary, and other decisionmakers whose power may be formal or informal (https://globalleadershipproject.net/)
• Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data: Machine-generated data on historical events between 1945 and 2015 extracted from 14 million news stories. It documents the agents, locations, and issues at stake in a wide variety of conflict, cooperation and communicative events.
• The Electoral Integrity Project: Data from expert surveys on the integrity of elections in countries around the globe (https://www.electoralintegrityproject.com/)
• PPEG Database on political parties, presidents, elections, and governments around the world (https://ppeg.wzb.eu/)
• Congress in Data: Information about the characteristics of US Congress Members, their legislative activities, and their social connections over five US Congress cycles: from the 109th to the 113th (2005-2015)
• Comparative Legislators Database (CLD)}: Rich, diverse and integrated individual-level data on national political representatives. The database contains information for over 67,000 contemporary and historical legislators from 16 countries (see also Göbel and Munzert 2022)
• WhoGov: Information (e.g., gender, party affiliation) on cabinet members in July every year in the period 1966-2021 in all countries with a population of more than 400,000 citizens (see also Nyrup and Bramwell 2020)
• Parliaments Day-By-Day: Open-source data on MPs’ membership in parties, parliaments, and party groups (see also Turner-Zwinkels et al. 2022)

Welfare state, social inequality, & social policies

• The Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database
• Global Welfare State Information System (WeSIS): comprehensive data to describe and explain social policy worldwide
• World Inequality Database (WID): global database on the distribution of wealth and income (see also Piketty 2014)
• Comparative Welfare Entitlements Project (CWEP): Comparative data on pension, unemployment, and sickness insurance generosity
• Moira Nelson’s and my comparative Unemployment Benefit Conditionality Dataset: Comparative data on job-search requirements, the definition of suitable work, and sanctions for unemployment benefit claimants in 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2012. See also the OECD’s dataset on benefit eligibility requirements for more recent data
• John Stephens & Evelyne Huber’s Comparative Welfare States & Social Policy in Latin America Datasets
• MISSOC: Qualitative information on social security and assistance schemes in EU countries (https://www.missoc.org/)
• OECD Benefits & Wages: Qualitative information on social security and social assistance schemes in OECD countries): Qualitative information on social security and social assistance schemes in OECD countries
• International Network on Leave Policies & Research: Qualitative reports on maternal, paternal, and parental leave schemes (https://www.leavenetwork.org/annual-review-reports/)
• European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) Reforms Watch: Individual EU country dossiers with fact-based information on the state of labour market reforms, the state of pension reforms, developments in legislation on strikes and data on strike activities
• Social Assistance in Developing Countries Database: Summary information on social assistance interventions in developing countries (https://www.social-protection.org/gimi/gess/ShowRessource.action?ressource.ressourceId=9491)
• Global Welfare (GLOW): The database includes 381 variables on 61 countries from years between 1989 and 2015. The database has four main categories of data: welfare, development, economy and politics
• Education Policies and Systems across Modern History EPSM dataset: measures on compulsory education, ideological guidance and content of education, governmental intervention and level of education centralization, and teacher training covering 157 countries with populations exceeding 1 million people from 1789 to the present (see also Del Rı́o, Knutsen, and Lutscher 2024)
• Global Tax Expenditures Database GTED: Information on preferential tax treatments such as exemptions, deductions, credits, deferrals and reduced tax rates that are implemented by governments worldwide to promote different policy goals.
• Barro-Lee Educational Attainment data: Data on educational attainment per country across the world between 1950 and 2010 (see also Barro and Lee 2013)
• See also Clasen and Siegel (2007), Clasen, Clegg, and Goerne (2016), and a special issue in the Journal of European Public Policy (Wenzelburger, Zohlnhöfer, and Wolf 2013; Danforth and Stephens 2013; Scruggs 2013) on the “dependent variable problem” in comparative social policy research

Immigration & immigrant integration

• Citizenship rights of immigrants (see also Koopmans, Michalowski, and Waibel 2012)
• Migrant Integration Policy Index MIPEX
• Migration Data Portal: information on the degree of restrictiveness of immigration policies in 33 OECD countries for the period 1980–2010
• Immigration Policies in Comparison: Quantitative indices to measure immigration policies in all OECD countries and for the time period 1980-2010. See also Helbling (2013) and Helbling and Michalowski (2017)
• Immigration in Party Manifestos Dataset (https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/information/documents/pimpo)

Technology & technological change

• OECD Risks that Matter surveys: Cross-country comparative survey data, incl. questions on perceived vulnerability to technological change (see e.g., Busemeyer et al. 2023; Knotz et al. 2024; Knotz 2025)
• EU KLEMS: Economic dataset that includes data on ICT investment for many countries and years (used by e.g., Gallego, Kurer, and Schöll 2022)
• AI exposure indicators: Indicators measuring exposure to AI at the occupational, industry, and regional (for US) level; see Felten, Raj, and Seamans (2021) for details
• Knowledge Economy Index: An index that measures the degree to which countries have transitioned toward a knowledge-based economy. The index covers 22 economically advanced countries between 1995 and 2019 (see also Diessner et al. 2025).

Social media

• TweetsKB: A database of annotated tweets, containing data for nearly 3.0 billion tweets between February 2013 - August 2022. Metadata information about the tweets as well as extracted entities, sentiments, hashtags and user mentions are exposed in RDF using established RDF/S vocabularies (see also Fafalios et al. 2018)
• The Twitter Parliamentarian Database: a database consisting of parliamentarian names, parties and twitter ids from the following countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, Poland, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, New Zealand, Turkey, United States, Canada, Australia, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Latvia and Slovenia. In addition, the database includes the European Parliament

Trade unions & industrial relations

• Database on Institutional Characteristics of Trade Unions, Wage Setting, State Intervention and Social Pacts ICTWSS
• European Works Councils Database: Information on works councils in European and multinational companies, on EU and national-level works council legislation, and on relevant court cases (EU and national level)
• European Company Survey: Comparative survey on businesses in Europe (see also Lehr, Jansen, and Brandl 2023)
• European Observatory of Working Life (EurWORK)

References

Barro, Robert J, and Jong Wha Lee. 2013. “A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950–2010.” Journal of Development Economics 104: 184–98.

Bormann, Nils-Christian, and Matt Golder. 2013. “Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2011.” Electoral Studies 32 (2): 360–69.

Busemeyer, Marius R., Mia Gandenberger, Carlo Knotz, and Tobias Tober. 2023. “Preferred Policy Responses to Technological Change: Survey Evidence from OECD Countries.” Socio-Economic Review 21 (1): 593–615.

Clasen, Jochen, Daniel Clegg, and Alexander Goerne. 2016. “Comparative Social Policy Analysis and Active Labour Market Policy: Putting Quality Before Quantity.” Journal of Social Policy 45 (1): 21–38.

Clasen, Jochen, and Nico A. Siegel, eds. 2007. Investigating Welfare State Change: The “Dependent Variable Problem” in Comparative Analysis. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Danforth, Benjamin, and John D. Stephens. 2013. “Measuring Social Citizenship: Achievements and Future Challenges.” Journal of European Public Policy 20 (9): 1285–98.

De Boer, Connie. 1983. “The Polls: Attitudes Toward Unemployment.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 47 (3): 432–41.

Del Rı́o, Adrián, Carl Henrik Knutsen, and Philipp M Lutscher. 2024. “Education Policies and Systems across Modern History: A Global Dataset.” Comparative Political Studies forthc.

Diessner, Sebastian, Niccolo Durazzi, Federico Filetti, David Hope, Hanna Kleider, and Simone Tonelli. 2025. “The Transition to the Knowledge Economy in Advanced Capitalist Democracies: A New Index for Comparative Research.” Socio-Economic Review forth.

Fafalios, Pavlos, Vasileios Iosifidis, Eirini Ntoutsi, and Stefan Dietze. 2018. “TweetsKB: A Public and Large-Scale RDF Corpus of Annotated Tweets.” arXiv Preprint 1810.10308.

Felten, Edward, Manav Raj, and Robert Seamans. 2021. “Occupational, Industry, and Geographic Exposure to Artificial Intelligence: A Novel Dataset and Its Potential Uses.” Strategic Management Journal 42 (12): 2195–2217.

Finney, Nissa, James Nazroo, Laia Bécares, Dharmi Kapadia, and Natalie Shlomo, eds. 2023. Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis. Bristol: Policy Press.

Gallego, Aina, Thomas Kurer, and Nikolas Schöll. 2022. “Neither Left Behind nor Superstar: Ordinary Winners of Digitalization at the Ballot Box.” The Journal of Politics 84 (1): 418–36.

Göbel, Sascha, and Simon Munzert. 2022. “The Comparative Legislators Database.” British Journal of Political Science 52 (3): 1398–408.

Golder, Matt. 2005. “Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2000.” Electoral Studies 24 (1): 103–21.

Helbling, Marc. 2013. “Validating Integration and Citizenship Policy Indices.” Comparative European Politics 11 (5): 555–76.

Helbling, Marc, and Ines Michalowski. 2017. “A New Agenda for Immigration and Citizenship Policy Research.” Comparative Political Studies 50 (1): 3–13.

Knotz, Carlo. 2025. “Technological Vulnerability Among the Higher-Educated: Implications for Party Preferences.” European Political Science Review forth.

Knotz, Carlo, Andrey Ugarte Montero, Maude Lavanchy, and Joël Wagner. 2024. “Bankers Are Afraid of Technology Now: Explaining Perceived Vulnerability to Technological Change Among the Higher-Educated.” Political Research Exchange 6 (1): 2389910.

Koopmans, Ruud, Ines Michalowski, and Stine Waibel. 2012. “Citizenship Rights for Immigrants: National Political Processes and Cross-National Convergence in Western Europe, 1980-2008.” American Journal of Sociology 117 (4): 1202–45.

Lehr, Alex, Giedo Jansen, and Bernd Brandl. 2023. “All about Power After All? A Multi-Level Analysis of Employers’ Organization Membership in Europe.” British Journal of Industrial Relations forthc.

Nyrup, Jacob, and Stuart Bramwell. 2020. “Who Governs? A New Global Dataset on Members of Cabinets.” American Political Science Review 114 (4): 1366–74.

Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Scruggs, Lyle. 2013. “Measuring and Validating Social Program Replacement Rates.” Journal of European Public Policy 20 (9): 1267–84.

Turner-Zwinkels, Tomas, Oliver Huwyler, Elena Frech, Philip Manow, Stefanie Bailer, Niels D Goet, and Simon Hug. 2022. “Parliaments Day-by-Day: A New Open Source Database to Answer the Question of Who Was in What Parliament, Party, and Party-Group, and When.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 47 (3): 761–84.

Wenzelburger, Georg, Reimut Zohlnhöfer, and Frieder Wolf. 2013. “Implications of Dataset Choice in Comparative Welfare State Research.” Journal of European Public Policy 20 (9): 1229–50.

Footnotes

1. See also https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/10/22/how-to-access-pew-research-center-survey-data/ for more details.