The collective action of data collection: A data infrastructure on parties, elections and cabinets

Abstract

Here, I introduce a novel approach towards data collection for comparative research and present a new data infrastructure on parties, elections and governments, the Parliament and Government Composition Database (ParlGov). This data infrastructure combines a database, data presentation in webpages and software scripts in order to generate more dynamic datasets and to facilitate cooperation. So far, it includes information about more than 1000 parties, around 600 elections (national and European Parliament) and almost 1000 governments with their party composition. These observations are linked to a wide set of information about party positions and make it possible to derive various datasets for studies in political science. To provide a first glance into the potential of this new data infrastructure, I map the political space of the European Union (EU) by drawing on this source.