Political Terror Scale, 1980-2004 A scale of 1-5 measuring government terror or the level of citizens’ fear of government persecution. Good for: Measuring levels of political violence. Geographic coverage: 208 countries plus regions and groupings based on income and indebtedness. Time period: 1980-2004 Documentation: Discussion of the scale, Scale notes. Citation: Gibney, Mark. 2004. Political…
Major official sources for Foreign Direct Investment: See the IMF and OECD’s document on How Countries Measure FDI. UNCTAD: Foreign Direct Investment Database FDI On-line (also called World Investment Directory Online) “Detailed statistics on foreign direct investment (FDI) and operations of transnational corporations (TNCs) in selected countries” FDI Statistics (from the Division on Investment, Technology…
CQ’s State Fact Finder 2006 (book) Carleton Reference HA 214 .C68 2006 “More than 265 Tables for Quick Research” “One-Stop Ranking Profiles for Every State” Surprisingly, the blurbs on the front of this book capture some of the most important reasons one would use this reference book. Congressional Quarterly gathers information from respected state, national,…
Pippa Norris (Harvard) Exceptionally valuable global indicators datasets and their documentation being shared by this scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Global Indicators Shared Dataset Variables: Over 700. Use the codebook. Geographic Coverage: 191 nations
The World Bank web site offers a helpful Statistical Manual, which provides definitions and methodological discussions of statistics collected by the World Bank and other institutions concerned with comparative international data. Their abstract: “The Statistical Manual brings together definitions of and explanations of the relationships between concepts used in economic statistics such as the balance…
Guide to Freely Available International Data Resources An annotated list of major free comparative national-level data sources, compiled by ESDS International.
Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California The IRI, founded in 1998, tracks political trends in initiataive, referendum, and recall. The web site of this organization provides a wealth of information and research aimed at journalists and policymakers. Archive of I&R Studies/Reports and Briefing Papers General Election Reports State by state reports…
The Almanac of American Education Carleton Reference Collection: LA 217.2 .A45 2005 “Helps you understand and compare the quality of U.S. education at the national, state, and county levels.” Even though there is a wealth of education statistics online, it can be of great help to use a paper publication like this one alongside those…
Letting the Odum Institute speak for itself: Data Archive Catalog “The Odum Institute maintains one of the oldest and largest catalog of machine-readable data in the U.S. It has an extensive collection of U.S. Census data, including one of the most complete holdings for 1970 Census files. Other major sources of data include the North…
CPANDA Cultural Policy & the Arts National Data Archive Data on participation in and policy on the arts: art forms, artists, performers, art education, audiences, cultural policy issues, media coverage of the arts, arts organizations, public attitudes, venues, etc. Much of it is survey data. Geographic coverage: national and state data for the United States.