Party Facts: A database of political parties worldwide

Abstract

Here, we present Party Facts ( www.partyfacts.org ), a modern online database of political parties worldwide. With this project, we provide a comprehensive database of political parties across time and world regions, link party information from some of the core social science data sets, and offer a platform to link political parties across data sets. An initial list of 4000 core parties in 212 countries is mainly based on four major data sets. The core parties in Party Facts are linked with party information from some of the key social science data sets, currently 26. From these data sets, we have included and linked about 15,000 party observations. Party Facts is an important step in developing a more coherent operationalization of political parties across time and space and a gateway to existing data sets on political parties. It allows answering innovative party research questions that require the combination of multiple data sets.

Measuring populism worldwide

“…To facilitate merging and multilevel analysis, the data set includes party metadata, such as each party's share of votes and seats in recent national elections. Standard party identification codes allow users to match the GPS data easily with several other party-level data sets, such as Party Facts (Döring and Regel, 2019), CHES, the Political Party Database (Scarrow et al, 2017), and Parliaments and Government (ParlGov). Similarly integrated codes in the data set also allow users to link GPS estimates of party values with party voters in cross-national surveys of the mass electorate, including the European Social Survey and World Values Survey (WVS).…”

Who Governs? A New Global Dataset on Members of Cabinets

“…5 The party affiliation is time variant and therefore takes into account whether members of the elite change parties. We use the abbreviations from the PartyFacts' database (Döring and Regel 2019), which allows researchers to merge this dataset with other datasets on parties. The process for adding party affiliation is described in depth in Appendix F.…”

The ParlSpeech V2 data set: Full-text corpora of 6.3 million parliamentary speeches in the key legislative chambers of nine representative democracies

“…However, we facilitate linkage with party-level data also along the party.facts.id variable. For most parties in our corpora, it points to the numeric identifier for the respective party in Döring and Regel's (2019) Party Facts database which in turn offers straightforward linkages e.g.…”