Data Sources: Governance and Institutional Quality

Data includes a 5-point "political terror scale" that codes countries on human-rights conditions and the rule of law, based on reports from Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department. The data cover the years 1976 - 2013 and are available for downloading.

The CPDS were produced by scholars at the University of Berne. They focus on OECD countries and post-communist countries and have and emphasis on electoral results, and ideological compositions of governments. Data covers 1960 - 2012.

The CIRI Human Rights Dataset contains standards-based quantitative information on government respect for 15 internationally recognized human rights for 202 countries, annually from 1981-2011. It is designed for use by scholars and students who seek to test theories about the causes and consequences of human rights violations, as well as policy makers and analysts who seek to estimate the human rights effects of a wide variety of institutional changes and public policies including democratization, economic aid, military aid, structural adjustment, and humanitarian intervention.

The Database of Political Institutions (DPI) was compiled by the Development Research Group of the World Bank for research in comparative political economy and comparative political institutions. Provides data on the political institutions and structures of different countries in the world from 1975 to 2012.

IAEP is a collection of data on political institutions and practices, and political elections for all countries in the international system between 1972 and 2005. The project is unique in its breadth of variables, ranging from legislatures to central banks, and in its breadth of countries, collecting such data on elections and institutions for both democratic and authoritarian states.

Created by Pippa Norris of Harvard University, this dataset is in a country-year case format, suitable for time-series analysis. It contains data on the social, economic and political characteristics of 191 nations with over 600 variables from 1971 to 2007. It merges the indicators of democracy by Freedom House, Vanhanen, Polity IV, and Cheibub and Gandhi, plus selected institutional classifications and also socio-economic indicators from the World Bank.