Library Guide Politics & Public administration:  by subject

Statistics Netherlands offers a wealth of data on the Dutch economy and society. From inflation to population, data are clearly presented as they are classified by theme, available to everyone.

Data.gov federates 200,000+ datasets from hundreds of sources, including federal government, cities, counties, states, and universities.

The European Union Open Data Portal (EU ODP) gives you access to open data published by EU institutions and bodies. All the data you can find via this catalogue are free to use and reuse for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
Self-teaching: Discover the EU Open Data portal

Eurostat is the Statistical Office of the European Communities situated in Luxembourg. Its task is to provide the European Union with statistics at European level that enable comparisons between countries and regions.

Dutch National Data portal. This portal provides an overview of all available datasets provided by government organisations in the Netherlands. Some of the data of the Dutch government is available in English.

This data platform bundles, processes and presents data from and about municipalities. The site provides figures for all 355 Dutch municipalities in all major policy areas.
Self-teaching: Manual, Introduction video part 1, Introduction video part 2, Introduction video part 3,

The website of the Centre for Parliamentary History (CPG) provides an overview of the publications and projects of this Nijmegen-based research institution. Main project: the parliamentary history of the Netherlands since 1945.
Dutch only.

The Chapel Hill expert surveys estimate party positioning on European integration, ideology and policy issues for national parties in a variety of European countries.

Parties’ policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties’ electoral manifestos

Association of Dutch Courts of Audit and audit committees. These authorities are tasked with checking whether the Dutch government and local authorities spend public funds economically, efficiently and effectively. You find links to a library and wiki with interesting publications available free of charge.

Central access point to all information about government organisations of the Netherlands, including parliamentary documents after 1995 and official governement publications.

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) assembles and codes information on the policy processes of governments from around the world.

Political Data Yearbook captures election results, national referenda, changes in government, and institutional reforms for a range of countries, within and beyond the EU.

The QoG Institute was founded in 2004 by Professor Bo Rothstein and Professor Sören Holmberg. It is an independent research institute within the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg. We conduct and promote research on the causes, consequences and nature of Good Governance and the Quality of Government (QoG) - that is, trustworthy, reliable, impartial, uncorrupted and competent government institutions.

Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) provides information on various policy areas and policy examples for municipalities.

The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) is an independent advisory body for government policy. Its position is governed by the Act Establishing a Scientific Council on Government Policy of 30 June 1976 (Instellingswet WRR). The task of the WRR is to advise the Dutch government and Parliament on strategic issues that are likely to have important political and societal consequences. Publications are best available and searched in the Dutch version of the website.

The website of Pippa Norris provides British and comparative datasets on politics, democracy and elections. I.a. the "Democracy Cross-national Dataset", a comparative dataset on democracy for 193 countries with over 1000 variables.
Free access, no registration

The European Election Studies (EES) are about electoral participation and voting behavior in European Parliament elections.
This includes the evolution of an EU political community and a European public sphere, with citizens’ perceptions of and preferences about the EU political regime, and with their evaluations of EU political performance.

Th esite of the Dutch Parliamentary Electoral Studies offers information about electoral research in the Netherlands (Nationaal Kiezersonderzoek).
The datasets of this research are available in DANS on this site, political scientists, journalists, students and others can find information about electoral research in the Netherlands. The site is developed and maintained by the board of SKON (the Dutch Foundation for Electoral Research).

The Standard Eurobarometer was established in 1974. Each survey consists of approximately 1000 face-to-face interviews per country. Reports are published twice yearly. Reproduction is authorised, except for commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged. Special Eurobarometer reports are based on in-depth thematic studies carried out for various services of the European Commission or other EU Institutions and integrated in the Standard Eurobarometer's polling waves. Reproduction is authorised, except for commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.

The European Social Survey (ESS) is an academically driven cross-national survey that has been conducted across Europe since its establishment in 2001. Every two years, face-to-face interviews are conducted with newly selected, cross-sectional samples. The survey measures the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of diverse populations in more than thirty nations.

The ISSP is a cross-national collaboration programme conducting annual surveys on diverse topics relevant to social sciences. Established in 1984 by its founding members Australia, Germany, Great Britain and the US, the ISSP has since included members covering various cultures around the globe. Its institutional members, each of them representing one nation, consist of academic organizations, universities, or survey agencies. Since its foundation, over one million respondents have participated in the surveys of the ISSP. All collected data and documentation is available free of charge.

The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) is a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 120,000 individuals aged 50 or older (more than 297,000 interviews). SHARE covers 27 European countries and Israel.

The WVS seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world, from 100 countries. Use this data to analyze such topics as economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being.
Registration needed for downloading data.

ECOI offers information on the political situation and living conditions, for countries of origin of asylum applicants in Europe. ECOI is managed by a department of the Austrian Red Cross, the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD). The database mainly contains reports, news and maps, with a focus on countries of origin. By providing this information ACCORD aims to promote 'fair and efficient refugee status determination procedures'.

The Correlates of War project is an academic study of the history of warfare. Concerned with collecting data about the history of wars and conflict among states, the project has driven forward quantitative research into the causes of warfare. The Correlates of War project seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations. Key principles of the project include a commitment to standard scientific principles of replication, data reliability, documentation, review, and the transparency of data collection procedures. (source: wikipedia).

The Democracy Index is compiled anually by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). It intends to measure the state of democracy in countries worldwide.
The EIU tracks countries on 60 indicators, grouped in 5 different categories and measures pluralism, civil liberties and political culture. The EIU divides countries in 4 categories: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes.
First published in 2006, compiled anally since 2010.
This link leads to the most recently published Democracy Index; older versions can be found online.

Freedom House provides reports on legal quality and political freedom woldwide.
Freedom House publishes annually reports (with underlying data) on e.g. the freedom of press and freedom on the internet, and the most well-known report series Freedom in the World (since 1972). Freedom House is based in the United States and retained financial ties with the U.S. government.

Tracks 284 politically-active ethnic groups throughout the world -- identifying where they are, what they do, and what happens to them. Focuses specifically on ethnopolitical groups, non-state communal groups that have 'political significance' in the contemporary world because of their status and political actions.

A non-profit, non-governmental organisation dedicated to fighting corruption. Corruption Perceptions Index and the Global Corruption Barometer.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new 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 Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is the world’s main provider of data on organized violence and the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war, with a history of almost 40 years. Its definition of armed conflict has become the global standard of how conflicts are systematically defined and studied.

The PTS meas­ures levels of polit­ic­al vi­ol­ence and ter­ror that a coun­try ex­per­i­ences in a par­tic­u­lar year based on a 5-level “ter­ror scale” ori­gin­ally de­veloped by Free­dom House.

The eLibrary of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) contains journals, books, working papers and studies, data and statistical tools. You will find information and perspective on macroeconomics, globalization, development, trade and aid, technical assistance, demographics, emerging markets, policy advice, poverty reduction, and much more.
IMF eLibrary also provides options to use data to make your own statistics and to export data in various formats.
Self-teaching: Tutorial

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Online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Find statistics organised both thematically and by country.
The University Library provides access to the 'Books', 'Papers' and the 'Statistics'.
Self-teaching: Tutorial video

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UN data and statistics from the official UN statistics division. The database also contains important information regarding the (global) standardisation and methodology of statistics such as best practices and classifications. It also includes links to several other big databases.

Reliable and tested macroeconomic data. Statistics and indicators are available with regard to a wide range of themes such as education, health and nutrition, and poverty. The data is especially relevant for making comparisons of countries or regions. Time-series data per country is also available. You can go directly to the various indicators as well. Please note, a wide range of Worldbank data is also included in Eikon.