Data

The PARTYPRESS Database (published soon)

A new Comparative Database 2022 of Parties’ Press Releases

with Heike Klüver and Lukas F. Stoetzer (presented at EPSA 2022)

Github repository: cornelius-erfort/scripts-issue-agendas

Abstract: We present the newly compiled PARTYPRESS Database which compiles more than 250,000 published press releases from 67 parties in nine European countries. The database covers the press releases of the most relevant political parties starting from 2010 onward. It provides a hand-labeled subset in 21 unique issue categories according to a general codebook. We discuss and evaluate different supervised machine learning approaches to obtain evolving issue agendas of the different parties. We extend a recent analysis in Gessler & Hunger (2022) to illustrate the usefulness of our approach in studying dynamic party competition, communication, and behavior.

Election Dataset Germany 1953-2017

County-level results made comparable over time using geodata and areal weighted interpolation

Github repository: cornelius-erfort/germany-53-17-districts

This repository provides historic, comparable county-level election results for West Germany since 1953. These can be easily merged with other historic data on the county level using offical county ID numbers (AGS, Allgemeiner Gemeindeschlüssel) that are also provided. The final dataset contains estimates for the vote share of all major parties for each election from 1953-2017 (within the boundaries of the 2017 counties) obtained from areal weighted interpolation.