LibGuides: Comparative Politics: Opinion & Data

Public Opinion

Newspapers and broadcast media are always excellent sources of public opinion data. In addition, check:

Polling the Nations
Questions & responses from more than 12,000 surveys conducted in the U.S. and 70 other countries.
Roper Center Public Opinion Archives (with iPOLL)
Data from surveys of public opinion and election polls from the 1930s onward, from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP)
Public opinion surveys investigating attitudes and behaviors related to democratic progress covering over 20 countries in the Americas.

Locating sources of data can be challenging. Fondren provides you access to the following:

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
Datasets and statistics related to social science and demographics. Since Rice is an ICPSR member institution, Rice students, faculty, and staff can register for a personal password and download information directly from ICPSR using a rice.edu email address.
LexisNexis Statistical
Index and abstracts for U.S. federal, U.S. state, and international organization publications.
Corresponds to print indexes American Statistics Index, Index to International Statistics, and Statistical Reference Index.

Europa - Eurostat (European Commission)
A portal into economic, and demographic data for the European Union

CQ Voting & Elections Collection
Data, authoritative analyses, concise explanations, and historical material on U.S. elections.

Historical Statistics of the United States
Statistical data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau and academic organizations. Permits users to graph individual tables and create customized tables and spreadsheets.

Psephos - Adam Carr's Election Archive
Election statistics from 176 countries.
United Nations Statistical Division databases
UNData provides an index to the statistical data from the UN and related agencies. Some data is available online; other data must be ordered or obtained from a depository library.
Our World in Data
Provides data and insights for issues around the globe. Created in collaboration between the University of Oxford and Global Change Data Lab.
Democratic Erosion Event Dataset
The Democratic Erosion Event Dataset (DEED) records discrete events related to democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation across countries and over time. The current beta version (v6) of DEED includes 5,979 events in 143 countries between 2000 and 2023. We track 4 different types of events: precursors to erosion; symptoms of erosion; resistance to erosion; and destabilizing events. Users can track trends over time in individual countries or across countries.