International Relations *

Listed below are links to sites that provide data on election results, voter turnout, and political party information outside of the United States. Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

• ACE Electoral Knowledge Network -- launched at the United Nations in 1998 by International IDEA, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), and the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), this site is the world’s largest online community and repository of electoral knowledge. It provides comprehensive information and specialized advice on any aspect of electoral processes, including materials, such as, legal frameworks, codes of conduct, electoral education materials, ballot paper, videos, and photos illustrating different parts of electoral processes or operations.. The foremost aim of ACE [Administration and Cost of Elections project] is to foster the integrity of elections and to promote credible, sustainable, professional and inclusive electoral processes throughout the world.
• African Elections Database -- a comprehensive archive of election results for the 49 countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Coverage ends around 2012. Each country's election page starts with a political profile that gives an overview of the political leadership and a brief history of the political situation in the country since its independence. The database is a useful source of historical data of information on presidential and legislative election results, dating back to the mid-1960s or earlier for most countries.
• African Elections Project [copy and paste this link: http://www.africanelections.org/] -- established 2008, this is an online portal covering elections across the continent with the vision of enhancing the ability of journalists, citizen journalists, and the news media to provide more timely and relevant elections information and knowledge while undertaking monitoring of specific and important aspects of governance.
• Australian Politics and Elections Database -- provides detailed information about Australian national and state parliamentary politics and elections, including votes won and seats gained by Australian political parties, the periods in office of various state, national and territorial elected officials, and summary tables on state and territory parliaments, elections, and governments over more than a century.
• British General Election Constituency Results – compiled by Dr. Pippa Norris at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, this collection provides access to data sets of British Parliamentary election results by constituency merged with UK census data from 1992 to the present (scroll down the page for the earlier files). Statistics are presented in multiple formats.
• Carter Center Election Reports -- a collection of reports documenting ninety-six elections in thirty-eight countries. During elections, the observers monitor voting and counting and remain after the ballots have been counted to monitor vote tabulation.This information is then summarized into reports, often including data on results and voter turnout.
• Center for Electoral Advice and Promotion [CAPEL] – a specialized program of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights, this organization functions within the framework of the Associations of Electoral Organizations to coordinate electoral observation missions in the countries of the Americas where electoral processes are carried out and include technical observation of the electoral process and impartial verification of the elections related to the administration of the electoral process, such as the electoral roll, voter identification document, voting materials, voting procedure, counting and counting of votes, transmission and publication of results, among others. Site is only in Spanish.
• Comparative Political Data Sets -- provided by the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern in Germany, data is divided into several part: Part 1 has dates of national parliamentary elections, voter turnout, and share of votes by party for 23 OECD countries from 1960-2009. Part II has election dates and turnout for parliamentary and presidential elections in 28 post-Communist countries from 1989-2006. Parts I and II also contains some additional demographic, socio- and economic variables. Part III combines I and II for 35 OECD and/or EU countries, 1990-2010. This data set is suited for cross national, longitudinal and pooled time series analyses.
• Database of Political Institutions – presents institutional and electoral results data such as measures of checks and balances, tenure and stability of the government, identification of party affiliation and ideology, and fragmentation of opposition and government parties in the legislature. The current version of the database expands its coverage to about 180 countries for 45 years, 1975-2020. It has become one of the most cited databases in comparative political economy and comparative political institutions.
• Democratic Electoral Systems Datasets [copy and paste this link: http://mattgolder.com/elections] – provides detailed coding of the electoral rules and party system size for 1,578 lower-house parliamentary and 602 first-round presidential elections in democratic states from 1946 through 2020. Codebook includes a glossary explaining the different electoral systems and formulas used for distributing seats. The site includes information on all elections that are considered democratic by at least one of five different measures of regime type: Democracy and Dictatorship (DD), Freedom House (FH), Polity5, Boix-Miller-Rosato (BMR), and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem).
• Election Passport [copy and paste this link: http://www.electionpassport.com/] -- provides access to comprehensive datasets of constituency election results in over ninety countries throughout the world. The data includes votes won by very small parties, independents, and candidate names that are often difficult to locate. This data will eventually be incorporated into the CLEA database linked above but, for now, search both sites.
• ElectionGuide -- launched in 1998 through a grant from USAID and currently funded by the same, this site provides the most comprehensive and timely source of verified election information available online, including national elections around the world; sub-national elections of high interest; political parties and candidates; referendum provisions; news on election-related laws and developments around the world; political institutions and electoral systems; and, election results and voter turnout.
• Europa World – a meticulously researched resource covering political, economic, and statistical information about more than 250 countries and territories, as well as international and regional organizations. Contents include authoritative information on every country, providing context for the world’s major political and economic developments, including up-to-date descriptions of political parties and recent election results for every country in the world.
• European NUTS-Level Election Database – provides national and European parliamentary election results on the level of Eurostat’s Regional election results are presented according to the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) level 2 and 3 administrative units, covering all EU (and associated) countries over the period 1990-2020. EU-NED is integrated with the Party Facts platform, allowing for a seamless integration of a wealth of party-level data.
• European Regional Election Data – contains European, national, and regional election results and turnout for European Parliament elections, national parliamentary elections, and regional assembly elections all disaggregated at the regional level for thirty countries for elections held between 1945 and 2015, with some 2021 results as well. Also provides datasets comparing the national and regional vote in elections.
• Extraterritorial Rights and Restrictions Dataset – site to research paper and time-series dataset of non-resident citizen voting policies and procedures. It codes the voting rights extended to non-resident citizens, the restrictions placed on the exercise of these rights, and how these rights and restrictions change over time for 195 countries for 1950 to 2020. Variables cover implementation, eligibility criteria, voting methods, quotas, and type of election. Data is presented in multiple formats.
• Global Elections Database [copy and paste this link: http://www.globalelectionsdatabase.com/] – formerly known as the Constituency-Level Elections Dataset, 2007, this site provides information on the results of both national and sub-national elections around the world. These data are presented at two levels of analysis, allowing users to quickly identify the results of elections within a country as a whole or within particular constituencies or districts of a country. All parties are included in the database regardless of the number of votes that they won. The data are based on countries' official election results and have been amassed from various government institutions. Data are accessible in spreadsheets, tables, and GIS maps formats. The tables allow you to quickly find out how many votes and seats a party won in a particular election, while the GIS maps allow you to visualize the election results across districts.
• IDEA [International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance] -- a database unifying data from a variety of sources related to voter turnout, issues of direct democracy, gender quotas, political finance, electoral justice, and voting from abroad, electoral system design for countries around the world. Includes access to the Voter Turnout Database, which offers a wide array of statistics on voter turnout from around the world, as well as other databases and search tools. Excellent source of data on international elections.
• International Foundation for Electoral Systems Election Guide -- produced by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), an international nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening electoral democracy, this is a comprehensive resource of verified election information that includes data on national elections around the world, including detailed  election results and voter turnout as well as information on sub-national elections of high interest, political parties and candidates, referendum provisions, political institutions and electoral systems, and news on election-related laws and developments around the world.
• Latin American Electronic Data Archive -- the focus of the collection is to provide access to electoral data, household survey microdata, and data relevant to social policy evaluation relevant to Latin American research, policy analysis, and teaching. Data sets and related information can be downloaded from the LAEDA collection in the University of Texas Digital Repository (UTDR).
• Lijphart Elections Archive -- a static research collection of district level election results for approximately 350 national legislative elections in 26 countries that was maintained through 2003. The objective of the Archive was to systematically collect election statistics in as much detail as possible, including, as a minimum, the results at the level of the individual election districts in which votes are converted into seats. The Archive is now a closed collection, and the most recent publications are from the 1990s.
• Lok Dhaba – a repository of datasets of Indian election results at both the Vidhan Sabha (state level) and the Lok Sabha (national level) from 1962 to the present. The data in Lok Dhaba is derived originally from the statistical reports published by the Election Commission of India. The data is cleaned and organized in a tabular format which you can viewed under the “Browse Data” tab. Some candidate demographics are included. The resource is compiled and maintained by scholars and statisticians at the Trivedi Center for Political Data at Ashoka University.
• The Manifesto Project -- analyzes parties’ election manifestos in order to study parties’ policy preferences. The Manifesto Project Dataset provides for the analysis of the policy preferences covers over 1000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents. The projects main dataset is updated twice a year. It provides instant access to manifesto texts and content-analytical data and gives accessible ways to easily explore and visualize the data and text corpus.
• National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) -- a dataset that provides detailed information on all election events from 1945-2020. To be included, elections must be for a national executive figure, such as a president, or for a national legislative body, such as a parliament, legislature, constituent assembly, or other directly elected representative bodies.
• Parline -- provides authoritative access, downloading, and reuse of data on the parliaments of the world. It comprises more than 600 data points for every country where there is a functioning parliament and the site facilitates comparative data analysis. Parline is produced with the cooperation of national parliaments, who provide and check the data through a network of  "Parline Correspodents."
• Parties and Elections in Europe [copy and paste this link: http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/index.html] – provides a comprehensive database about political parties, elections and governments in all European countries. The website contains the results of parliamentary elections from more than 100 countries and autonomous regions in Europe. The parties are classified according to their political orientation. Historical data can be found in the archive.
• Party Systems and Governments Observatory – this site offers data on the party systems and government cabinets of democratic European states from 1848 to 2019. It also contains information on a range of party system indicators from party, and party system institutionalization scores, to electoral volatility and polarization via the number of parties and electoral disproportionality. In terms of governments, the database contains information on cabinet duration (i.e. dates of formation and termination), the names of the various ministerial offices as well as of the people appointed to occupy them, and the partisan affiliation of each minister at the time a particular cabinet is appointed. A total of sixty-eight European democratic political regimes are covered.
• Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Dataverse  – uses experts to rate whether national elections meet internationally-recognized standards. Data covers elections in 150+ countries covering the years 2017 to the present. Collects 49 indicators to evaluate eleven stages in the electoral cycle as well as generating an overall Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) index and comparative ranking. The Electoral Integrity Project site posts an annual Year in Election Report describing the full results.
• The Political Data Yearbook – provides open access and fully searchable data on elections, national referenda, changes in government, and institutional reforms in the European Union and eight non-EU countries since 1992. In addition, leading experts on the politics of each country provide commentary about key political events and the principal issues in national politics. Users can view different types of data in graphical format, customize by adjusting time settings or selecting parties to view, and download full datasets (with footnotes).
• Psephos [copy and paste this link: http://psephos.adam-carr.net/] -- archive of election data created and maintained by Dr. Adam Carr, a political and social activist in Australia, this is promoted to be the largest, most comprehensive and most up-to-date archive of electoral information in the world, with election statistics from 182 countries. Very good site to begin ones search for information.
• VoteWatch Europe – a non-profit organization based in Brussels that tracked voting behavior in the European Parliament and EU Council. The project was founded by Simon Hix, Doru Frantescu, and Sara Hagemann, and ran from 2008 until June 2022. The project used roll-call data collection and analysis techniques developed by Simon Hix and Abdul Noury of the European University Institute.
• Voter Turnout Database -- provides access to voter turnout figures for 171 independent states, covering national presidential and parliamentary elections since 1945 from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Always growing, the database also includes European Parliament elections, as presented by country using both the number of registered voters and voting age population as indicators, and in some cases the data includes statistics on spoilt ballot rate. The database allows you to search for data by country or field, and even download all the data from the database in one file.
• World Elections -- a non-partisan and neutral blog covering major world elections and referendums as well as discussions on matters directly related to elections, electoral systems, and voting behavior.  Entries are posted monthly beginning in October 2008.

Descriptions of resources are adapted or quoted from vendor websites.

Foreign Election Data Research Guide

Jeremy Darrington, the Politics Librarian at Princeton University, has created an excellent guide to foreign election data sites at the multi-country level, the electoral constituency/ district level, as well as voting data for international organizations. I encourage you to visit the site to find additional overseas election results sources. The data is located HERE

Regional “barometer” surveys, in general, look at the social, political and economic atmosphere in various countries—often including opinions on democracy. Generally, these surveys are given annually or in waves to nationally representative samples of adults; however, methodology, scope, content, and availability may vary.