Resources

Welcome to my resources page! This is a page with a variety of teaching material of all kinds. Many of the things below have been compiled by Fynch Meynent, who is TAing on the Democracy class in 2026.

General readings in comparative politics

I strongly recommend you consult some of the books below if you consider that you do not have a general understanding of comparative politics. Everybody should read Lijphart!

De Vries, C. E., Hobolt, S. B., Proksch, S. O., & Slapin, J. B. (2021). Foundations of European politics: a comparative approach. Oxford University Press.

*Clark, W. R., Golder, M., & Golder, S. N. (2017). Principles of comparative politics. CQ Press

Newton, K., & Van Deth, J. W. (2005). Foundations of comparative politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dickovick, J. T., & Eastwood, J. (Eds.). (2019). Comparative Politics: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press.

Hague, R., Harrop, M. & McCormick, J., (2017), Political Science: a comparative introduction, Red Glob Press.

O’Neil, P. H. (2017). Essentials of comparative politics. WW Norton & Company.

Robinson, J. A., & Acemoglu, D. (2012). Why nations fail: The origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Crown Business, New York.

Grossman, E., & Sauger, N. (2007). Les systèmes politiques des pays de l’Union européenne. Bruxelles: De Boeck.

*Lijphart, A. (1999). Patterns of democracy. Government forms and performance in thirty-six countries. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Mény, Y., & Surel, Y. (2008). Politique comparée. Paris: Montchrestien.

Ragin, C. (1987). The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies. Berkeley, C.A.: University of California Press.

Seiler, D. L. (2004). La méthode comparative en science politique. Paris: Armand Colin.

Strøm, K., Müller, W. C., & Bergman, T. (Eds.). (2003). Delegation and accountability in parliamentary democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tsebelis, G. (2002). Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Caramani, D (ed.) (2017), Comparative Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Data sources for Comparative Politics

Quality of government dataset

The dataset I most use for coursework, but also for research (sometimes). It combines a host of different data sources and there is a cross-sectional version, a time-series version and an OECD countries version.

https://www.gu.se/en/quality-government/qog-data/data-downloads

Comparative Agendas

I have been involved for the past 20 years in the Comparative Agenda Project, an ambitious data collection effort that now extends to about 30 countries. We are currently thinking about depositing data on a public dataverse, but no decision has been taken.

https://www.comparativeagendas.net/datasets_codebooks

For more information, on this you may have a look at this open-access book.

Parlgov - Elections in the EU and the OECD

This dataset is extremely rich and useful, as it covers elections in very many countries from 1900 to 2023. It has unfortunately been discontinued, but the data is in principle easy to complete:

https://parlgov.fly.dev/

Executive Approval Database

Tim Hellwig and Matt Singer have coordinated an interesting data-collection effort that has led to the creation of a publicly accessible dataset on the evolution of government approval in large set of countries going back in some cases to the immediate post-war period.

https://executiveapproval.org/

European Social Survey

The best comparative survey on social and political attitudes in Europe. A total of 12 waves are available since 2000 from up to 40 countries. Combining this with other data is possible, of course, even though it is not always straightforward. The data-builde wizard is very useful:

https://ess.sikt.no/en/data-builder/

WhoGov

This is a very original and complete dataset of members of government in 177 countries from 1966 to 2023. Information is collected for the month of July every year. In total, the dataset contains data on 58,670 cabinet members in 177 countries, adding up to 9,153 country-years.

https://politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/whogov-dataset/

National Electoral Data

This is a list of national electoral data sources. Please note that data is not equally available in all countries. Some of them may provide only aggregate data. Also, some sites have an English version, but the original language one can be more complete.

Create your own corpus of data (Advanced)

This list isn’t exhaustive.

Media

  • Europresse: You have an access with Sciences Po Library. It’s possible to download a corpus by groups of 1,000 articles in HTML format. Then, you can create a readable dataset using R libraries (for example, with XML or xml2). Don’t use a bot on Europresse; it’s forbidden by Sciences Po and it may compromise the access for everyone.

  • Factiva: You also have access with Sciences Po Library. It’s possible to download some articles in PDF or RTF format (but the number of words by request is limited).
    Don’t use a bot on Factiva; it’s forbidden by Sciences Po and it may compromise the access for everyone.

Social media

  • minet: can be used with a command line tool or Python. You can scrape data from social media (however, it doesn’t work well for X/Twitter).

  • zeeschuimer: A browser extension to collect the data you browse on social media. If you download the data collected in NDJSON format, you can convert it into a friendly CSV dataset with zeehaven.

Other

  • SearchEnginesBookmarklet: Collect the results of web search engines while browsing and obtain a readable output in a CSV dataset.

Tools for data analysis

R

To get started

Data analysis

Python

To get started

Data analysis

  • PythonDS: Tutorials for data processing, visualization, machine learning, regression analysis, Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Non-coding tools

Analysis

  • Cortext: A data analysis platform that can help you to do statistics or analyze textual content.

Visualisation

  • Nansi: Visualization of networks.
  • IWantHue: Generate palettes of optimally distinct colors for your graphs.