Research Guides: Politics: Data

Key Politics Data Sets

American National Election Studies
To serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists, the ANES produces high quality data from its own surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation. ANES data enable researchers to better understand the theoretical and empirical foundations of national election outcomes.
CIRCLE
CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) conducts research on the civic and political engagement of young Americans.
Congress.gov
Congress.gov is the official source for federal legislative information. It replaces the nearly 20-year-old THOMAS.gov site with a system that includes platform mobility, comprehensive information retrieval and user-friendly presentation. It currently includes all data sets available on THOMAS.gov except nominations, treaties and communications. These data sets will be added throughout 2014.

EIU Economist Intelligence Unit - Country data via CIAO This link opens in a new window
Find up-to-date economic, political, and geographic information by country.

General Social Survey
The GSS contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. The GSS takes the pulse of America, and is a unique and valuable resource. It has tracked the opinions of Americans over the last four decades.

ICPSR Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research This link opens in a new window
ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

LAPD Crime Mapping
Interactive maps of crimes by type and neighborhood Sept 2011-Present.
Pew Research Center: Databank
ProPublica
World Bank
The World Bank provides free and open access to a comprehensive set of data about development in countries around the globe, together with other datasets cited in the data catalog. Broader access to these data allow policymakers and advocacy groups to make better-informed decisions and measure improvements more accurately. They are also valuable tools to support research by journalists, academia and others, broadening understanding of global issues.
Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor is the principal Federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and price changes in the economy. Its mission is to collect, analyze, and disseminate essential economic information to support public and private decision-making. As an independent statistical agency, BLS serves its diverse user communities by providing products and services that are objective, timely, accurate, and relevant.
World Values Survey
The World Values Survey (www.worldvaluessurvey.org) is a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life, led by an international team of scholars, with the WVS association and secretariat headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.
Yale ISPS Data Archive
The ISPS Data Archive consists primarily of social science research based on experiments. The Archive is organized by study and includes the data, analysis code, requisite documentation, and other associated materials. All published materials have been reviewed to enable long-term usability. Read about our approach to curating for reproducibility. Access to the ISPS Data Archive is provided at no cost and is granted for scholarship and research purposes only.
World Fact Book
Get profiles of every nation, including information on the geography, people, government, economy, military, and more. Produced by the CIA.

Searching for Data on a Specific Topic

If you Google your topic with the term "statistics" or "data," Google is unlikely to produce results that offer you good data. However, within your results, you may find articles that cite original data sets from institutions like universities, research centers, government agencies, or non-partisan think tanks.

To increase your odds of finding useful citations, try searching for your topic and "statistics" or "data" using Google Scholar and Google News. In your results, take note of which institutions collect the data that interest you. Find those institutions on-line via Google and explore the data pages of their websites.