Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Resources on elections

If you want another source to refer students to when they're looking for elections information and data (or if you're looking for data for a lecture), here's a really good suggestion.

Josh Tucker, on The Monkey Cage blog, points out this valuable resource on election data:
For those who are not yet aware of it, I wanted to draw your attention to Manuel Alvarez-Rivera’s election-related websites.

His Election Resources on the Web site has data, links to official election results, and lots of other useful information.

Users should be aware that this is not simply one large dataset that you can download, but instead is a great resource if you are trying to find election results and related links to both data and more information about that election.

I’ve only just begun poking around, but there seems to be some variety in how far back the data go.

Also, interestingly, the cover page is organized chronologically by election - which is nice if you want to quickly look for recent elections - and not alphabetically by country, but this is easily overcome by simply using a the “Find” function in your browser.

He’s also got an accompanying blog to the site here.

This data should be a nice compliment to the voluminous election results now found on Wikipedia (here and here and here and here), which is where the old Wilfried Derksen Election Archives migrated. As with Alvarez-Rivera’s site you get the added advantage of knowing a single standard (or at the very least a single person using their own standard) is being applied to collect the data.

[Hat tip to Athanassios Roussias]


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