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Debate Team: Library Resources for UK Debate

Finding Datasets

United States:

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.

Google Dataset Search:

A search engine for datasets. Search by keyword for datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web.