The heads of Government Dataset

The Heads of Government Dataset, version 2.0 (2024), provides summary information about the ideological orientation of heads of government (left, center, or right, with separately provided information about religious orientation) in 33 states in Western Europe, the Americas, and the Asia-Pacific region between 1870 and 2023.

We ask users of the dataset to include the following citation: Brambor, Thomas, Johannes Lindvall, Ann-Ida Gyllenspetz, and Annika Stjernquist. 2024. Heads of Government dataset (version 2.0, 16 April 2024). University of Gothenburg.

The project is described in detail in Brambor, Thomas, and Johannes Lindvall. 2018. The Ideology of Heads of Government, 1870–2012. European Political Science 17(2), 211–222. 

The dataset is available in the leader-year and country-year formats and there is both a .dta and a .csv version. We also provide a combined research note and codebook with variable descriptions and summary information about the updates in version 2.0.

Download the data:
Research note and codebook
Leader-year .dta
Leader-year .csv
Country-year .dta
Country-year .csv

The Information Capacity Dataset

The most recent version of the Information Capacity Dataset (Brambor et al. 2020) is available from the Demscore website.

The Historical Immigration Policies Dataset

The Historical Immigration Policies Dataset (Peters et al. 2024) is available from the Demscore website. It can also be downloaded here.