National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy

Source - Susan Hyde and Nikolay Marinov

Description - The principal investigators introduce a unique dataset that provides in-depth information on all elections from 1996-2006 in 158 countries. This comprehensive election-level set diverges from standard cross-temporal, cross-national datasets in that it uses separate election events (the electionid variable) as the identifying variable, in contrast to the country-year structure that is generally prevalent in current work on electoral data. The nature of the dataset allows the electionid to be collapsed into required units of analysis, as well as providing the opportunity to analyse elections by type. Additionally, by avoiding the country-year structure, the NELDA dataset allows researchers to analyse variation between elections within country-years. NELDA includes over 50 substantive variables that concentrate on the presence of competition, varying electoral processes, external involvement in election processes, and characteristics that set apart democratic polities from autocratic ones. The data can prove useful for researchers studying political corruption. Overall, this dataset adds an important contribution in both its extensive coverage of democratic and autocratic elections and its structure based on election events rather than country-years. The dataset forms the foundation for the investigators' forthcoming manuscript “National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy: Which Elections Can Be Lost?”.

Tags - Elections, Political Corruption, Global, Empirical Data Analysis, Comparative Analysis

Collection Date -

URL to Database Source - http://hyde.research.yale.edu/nelda/#contact