Finding Datasets
- Statista
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Statista integrates statistical data on over 80,000 topics from over 22,000 sources onto a single platform, providing researchers direct access to quantitative data on media, business, finance, politics, and a wide variety of other areas of interest or markets. It also provides data on market forecasts, white paper studies, dossiers, industry reports, digital market outlooks and consumer market outlooks. - Explore Census Data (from the U.S. Census Bureau)
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Includes a single search bar as well as an advanced search where you can easily build a search using topics, geography, and years. - Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Access to social science data files, including coverage of such topics as population, economics, education, health, social and political behavior/attitudes, terrorism, history, crime, aging, and substance abuse. Direct downloading is available. Registration with a MyData account is required for most data file downloads. The data files require statistical software (e.g., SAS, SPSS, Stata) to manipulate the data.
United States:
- Data.gov: Home of the US government’s open data and includes Federal, state and local data, tools, and resources to conduct research, build apps, design data visualizations, and more.
- IQSS (Institute for Qualitative Social Science at Harvard) Dataverse Network: Links to a large collection of social science research data
- Data World: Open data sets contributed by users and organizations.
- American National Election Studies: Data on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists
- General Social Survey (NORC at the University of Chicago): Contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings.
International:
- World Bank Open Data: The World Bank's Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank data sources.
- UN Data: Users can search and download a variety of statistical resources compiled by the United Nations (UN) statistical system and other international agencies.
- International Monetary Fund (IMF) eLibrary: Provides access to the IMF’s periodicals, books, working papers and studies, and data and statistical tools.
- Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) i-Library: Online library of the OECD, including its books, papers and statistics, which serves as the knowledge base of OECD's analysis and data.
Political Institutions:
- Quality of Government Institute: The main objective of the institute's research is to address the theoretical and empirical problem of how political institutions of high quality can be created and maintained, and the effects of quality of government on a number of policy areas, such as health, the environment, social policy, and poverty. The Standard Data includes over 2000 coded variables divided into sixteen thematic categories such as Quality of Government, Economy, Media, Environment, and Political System etc. Read the Codebook to determine if the variable you need is covered in the dataset.
- 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, among others. The current version of the database, hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank, expands its coverage to about 180 countries for 40 years, 1975-2017.
A search engine for datasets. Search by keyword for datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web.