How Do I Find ~ Statistics and Data

Official results of past federal elections.

U.S. national, state, and primary Election Day exit polls since the 1970s. Since 1976, all polls include basic demographic variables (e.g., gender, race, education, etc.).

Database of the electoral and popular vote results from 1789 to the present, maintained by the UCSB. Additional information such as presidential job approval rating and the number of executive orders is also available.

Precinct-level general election results since 2012 with ESRI shapefiles. It also offers voter turnout data across states and demographics.

Offers U.S. federal, state, and local election results since 2016 by state, district, county, and precinct.

Campaign finance reports and data from 1993 to present.

A clearinghouse for data and analysis, tracking money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy. Includes financial data on campaigns, independent interest groups (i.e., 527 committees), lobbyists, congressional travel, and the personal finances of the president and members of Congress.

Data and analysis of women's voting behavior, including statistics on turnout and the gender gap in voting.

Surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation in the U.S., 1948-current.

History Lab offers searchable databases and basic text analysis tools for the Freedom of Information Archive (FOIArchive), which consists of over 4.6 million declassified documents in foreign relations.

Information on arms-producing and military services. Includes public and private companies, but not manufacturing or maintenance units of the armed services. Coverage: 2002 to present.

Contains information on all transfers of major conventional weapons. Coverage: 1950 to present.

Coverage: 1949 to present.

Data on all multilateral peace operations (both UN and non-UN) conducted around the world.
Note: The Multilateral Peace Operations Database is currently not publicly available online. Contact SIPRI for access to the data.

Data regarding the content of military alliance agreements signed by all countries of the world between 1815 and 2018.

VIINA/ВІЙНА/ВОЙНА/WAR is a near-real-time multi-source event data system for the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine. These data are based on news reports from Ukrainian and Russian media, which were geocoded and classified into standard conflict event categories through machine learning.

The Democracy and Dictatorship Project (DD) classifies political regimes as democracy and dictatorship. Classification of democracies is either parliamentary, semi-presidential (mixed), or presidential. Classification of dictatorships is either military, civilian or royal. The data set covers 202 countries from 1946 to 2008.

Freedom in the World tracks global trends in political rights and civil liberties for 195 countries (+15 territories) since 1973. Specifically, it analyzes the electoral process, political pluralism and participation, the functioning of the government, freedom of expression and of belief, associational and organizational rights, the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights.

The Polity Project codes authority characteristics of states in the world system for purposes of comparative, quantitative analysis. Its latest release, the Polity 5 dataset covers all major, independent states in the global system over the period 1800-2018.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) provides a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles (483 V-Dem indicators, 82 indices and 5 high-level indices). The data set covers 202 countries from 1789 to 2020.