ERDDA presents the comparative data collection efforts undertaken by various research and data infrastructure projects on political institutions, political parties, cabinets and governments in Europe.
Here we offer a range of datasets available for free (without even a demand for registration). Please select one of the projects to download data and supporting documentation.
Ongoing projects
Party Government in Europe Database
Party Government in Europe Database (PAGED) is a research infrastructure project that aims to build a state-of-the-art database for comparative coalition research on political institutions, political parties, parliaments and governments. This project builds on the previous international and comparative projects on European parliamentary democracy that are available here on ERDDA and concern key issues of todays representative democracy namely delegation, accountability, government formation, governance and government dissolution.
Data archive
Open access data from completed projects
Coalition Governance in Central Eastern Europe [New Release 2020]
Coalitions among political parties govern most of Europe’s parliamentary democracies. Traditionally, the study of coalition politics focuses on Western Europe. Coalition governance in Central Eastern Europe brings the study of the full coalition life-cycle to a region that has undergone tremendous political transformation, but which has not been studied from this perspective. The data set covers Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
Representative Democracy in Europe
The Representative Democracy in Europe project examines the key actors of representative democracy in the 27 EU member states: voters, political parties, parliaments and governments. This is a research project with more limited data collection efforts. Some additional data are available in the replication files for the publications within the project. In addition, in the project we have corrected, updated and added some key variables in the ERD dataset (that will be released in spring 2020).
The European Representative Democracy project
The latest release of the data set on European cabinets, parliaments and political parties were published in February 2014. The data are collected for the study of some of the most important events in representative democracy: the formation and termination of governments. In addition, inspired by Peter Mair’s (1998: 86) statement in A New Handbook of Political Science (Oxford University Press) that “it must surely remain a priority for comparative research to stimulate the collection of systematically comparable data” we have resisted the temptation to code what we first found and instead double-checked multiple sources against each other to establish the best possible coding.
The Comparative Parliamentary Democracy program
The CPD program is devoted to the comprehensive study of West European cabinets and informed by and has contributed greatly to coalition research. The various volumes produced by the CPD program describe every governing coalition, the parliamentary seat distribution, and the institutional rules parliaments operated under from the beginning of the post-World War II to 1999. The latest data were added in March 2012.
The Nordic Politics Data Archive
This section presents information concerning Nordic politics, such as interviews with Nordic politicians and other useful information on Nordic politics translated to English. This data provides (1) information on the 2011 volume The Madisonian Turn, (2) a recently completed research project about Swedish constitutional reforms and (3) a chronological account of how the Swedish electoral law has changed since World War II.