Elections and Parties Database

Elections and Parties Database
Name	Elections and Parties Database
Type	Academic database
Established	20th century
Maintained by	Research institutions
Coverage	Global elections and political parties
Languages	Multilingual

Elections and Parties Database

The Elections and Parties Database is a specialized scholarly resource compiling systematic records of electoral contests, party organizations, candidacies, and results. Its datasets are used by researchers at institutions such as Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, University of Cambridge, and London School of Economics and inform analyses published in journals like American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Democracy, Electoral Studies, and International Organization. The database interfaces with projects including the Varieties of Democracy project, the Quality of Government dataset, the Correlates of War project, the Polity Project, and the World Bank’s governance indicators.

Overview

The database aggregates longitudinal information on electoral events across continents including entries tied to countries such as United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, India, China, Brazil, Russia, Japan, and South Africa. It documents party systems involving organizations like the Republican Party (United States), Democratic Party (United States), Conservative Party (UK), Labour Party (UK), Social Democratic Party of Germany, Bharatiya Janata Party, Chinese Communist Party, Workers' Party (Brazil), United Russia, and African National Congress. Coverage extends to supranational institutions like the European Parliament, regional bodies such as the Organization of American States, and historical contests including the French legislative election, 1789, German federal election, 1871, and the Indian general election, 1951–52.

Data Content and Scope

Content includes vote shares, seat allocations, candidate lists, party manifestos, electoral law changes, and turnout figures for events like the United States presidential election, 2008, United Kingdom general election, 2010, French presidential election, 2017, German federal election, 2021, and Indian general election, 2019. It covers party biographies for entities such as Labour Party (Norway), Christian Democratic Union (Germany), Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), National Rally (France), Justice and Development Party (Turkey), and Fidesz. Historical archives include datasets tied to the Weimar Republic, Third French Republic, Apartheid-era South Africa, Weimar Republic elections, and post-colonial transitions in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. Data fields often reference electoral rules from statutes like the Representation of the People Act 1918, the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Single Transferable Vote Act, and constitutional provisions such as the Constitution of India.

Methodology and Sources

Methodological standards draw on comparative frameworks employed by teams at Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Primary sources include official returns from ministries such as the Electoral Commission (United Kingdom), the Federal Election Commission, national electoral bodies like the Election Commission of India, legislative records from assemblies like the Knesset, the Bundestag, and the Assemblée nationale (France), and archival holdings at institutions including the British Library, National Archives (United States), Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Russian State Archive. Secondary sources include monographs by scholars like Samuel P. Huntington, Giovanni Sartori, Arend Lijphart, Robert Dahl, and Larry Diamond as well as datasets from IPU, UNDP, and Human Rights Watch reports.

Access and Use

Access is typically provided to academic users at repositories like Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research and platforms maintained by centers such as the Oxford Internet Institute, Harvard Dataverse, and the Belfer Center. Licensing arrangements mirror practices at organizations like Creative Commons and institutional repositories at European University Institute and Australian National University. Researchers cite the database in analyses of elections like the Mexican general election, 2006, Argentine general election, 2015, Philippine presidential election, 2016, and Kenyan general election, 2007. Policy analysts at the United Nations, European Commission, African Union, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and NATO also use derived indicators for electoral assessment missions.

Applications and Impact

Scholars deploy the data in studies on party systems following typologies by Sartori, in modeling electoral volatility in cases such as Spain, Italy, and Greece, and in testing hypotheses about democratization related to Third Wave of Democratization. The database supports quantitative research on incumbency effects examined in the United States Senate elections and on coalition formation in parliamentary contests such as the Israeli legislative election, 2019. It informs policy debates on electoral reform referencing legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and drives comparative teaching modules at London School of Economics, Sciences Po, and Hertie School. NGOs including Transparency International and International IDEA rely on its statistics for monitoring.

Limitations and Criticism

Critiques focus on uneven coverage of small polities like Tuvalu, Nauru, San Marino, and Liechtenstein and on historical gaps for periods such as the Ottoman Empire late-period elections and irregular records from Central African Republic and Somalia. Methodological debates involve comparability issues raised by scholars at Princeton and Stanford regarding the coding of party labels in contexts like Iran and Venezuela. Concerns about digitization quality arise with archival transformations similar to those encountered by the British Library and National Archives (UK), and ethical questions over data reuse parallel disputes in repositories like Figshare and Zenodo.

Category:Political databases