A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or policy goals.
Philip Ernest Converse was an American political scientist. He was a professor in political science and sociology at the University of Michigan who conducted research on public opinion, survey research, and quantitative social science.
Political polarization is the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes.
Comparative politics is a field in political science characterized either by the use of the comparative method or other empirical methods to explore politics both within and between countries. Substantively, this can include questions relating to political institutions, political behavior, conflict, and the causes and consequences of economic development. When applied to specific fields of study, comparative politics may be referred to by other names, such as comparative government.
An independent voter, often also called an unaffiliated voter or non-affiliated voter in the United States, is a voter who does not align themselves with a political party. An independent is variously defined as a voter who votes for candidates on issues rather than on the basis of a political ideology or partisanship; a voter who does not have long-standing loyalty to, or identification with, a political party; a voter who does not usually vote for the same political party from election to election; or a voter who self-describes as an independent.
Freedom in the World is a yearly survey and report by the U.S.-based non-governmental organization Freedom House that measures the degree of civil liberties and political rights in every nation and significant related and disputed territories around the world.
The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) is a collaboration between different nations conducting surveys covering topics which are useful for social science research. The ISSP researchers develop questions which are meaningful and relevant to all countries which can be expressed in an equal manner in different languages. The results of the surveys provide a cross-national and cross-cultural perspective to individual national studies. By 2021, 58 countries have already taken part in the ISSP.
The German General Social Survey (ALLBUS/GGSS - Die Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaften) is a national data generation program in Germany, which is similar to the American General Social Survey (GSS). Its mission is to collect and disseminate high quality statistical surveys on attitudes, behavior, and social structure in Germany.
Richard Rose is a political scientist, author, and academic whose comparative studies in social science have significantly influenced political science and public policy in both practice and theory. He is a Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde (UOS) in Scotland, and is a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
The Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) is a national research infrastructure, created in 2008. FORS is financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the University of Lausanne. Its purpose is to provide services to the social science research community, to conduct research, and to publish and disseminate research findings.
The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the largest academic social research and survey organization in the world, established in 1949. ISR includes more than 300 scientists from a variety of academic disciplines – including political science, psychology, sociology, economics, demography, history, anthropology, and statistics. The institute is a unit that houses five separate but interdependent centers which conduct research and maintain data archives. In 2021, Kathleen Cagney became the first woman in its history to be named Director of the institute.
Research strategies in the field of election campaign communication research are the decisions made concerning the objective, the scope, the sampling and the methodology used within a study of election campaign communication.
The GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences is the largest German infrastructure institute for the social sciences. It is headquartered in Mannheim, with a location in Cologne. With basic research-based services and consulting covering all levels of the scientific process, GESIS supports researchers in the social sciences. As of 2017, the president of GESIS is Christof Wolf.
Democracy-Dictatorship (DD), index of democracy and dictatorship or simply the DD index or the DD datasets was the binary measure of democracy and dictatorship first proposed by Adam Przeworski et al. (2010), and further developed and maintained by Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland (2009). Note that the most recent dataset was updated 2008.
David M. Farrell is a political scientist. He was appointed to the Chair of Politics at University College Dublin in 2009, having returned to Ireland after two decades working at the University of Manchester, where from 2006-09 he was Head of the School of Social Sciences. A specialist in the study of electoral systems, elections and parties, he has published 15 books and over 90 articles and book chapters. His most recent books include: Political Parties and Democratic Linkage (2011), which was awarded the GESIS Klingemann Prize for the Best Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Scholarship, and Electoral Systems. He is the founding co-editor of Party Politics, the President of the Political Studies Association of Ireland and the Speaker of the Council of the European Consortium for Political Research. In 2013 he was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. In March 2019 he and Dr Jane Suiter were awarded the Brown Democracy Medal for the Irish Citizens' Assembly Project.
The V-Dem Institute, founded by Staffan I. Lindberg in 2014, studies the qualities of government. The headquarters of the project is based at the department of political science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Political polarization is a prominent component of politics in the United States. Scholars distinguish between ideological polarization and affective polarization, both of which are apparent in the United States. In the last few decades, the U.S. has experienced a greater surge in ideological polarization and affective polarization than comparable democracies.
Daniele Caramani is a comparative political scientist.
The Democracy Indices by V-Dem are democracy indices published by the V-Dem Institute that describe qualities of different democracies. This dataset is published on an annual basis and is publicly available and free. In particular, the V-Dem dataset is popular among political scientists and describes the characteristics of political regimes worldwide. In total, datasets released by the V-Dem Institute include information on hundreds of indicator variables describing all aspects of government, especially on the quality of democracy, inclusivity, and other economic indicators. An R package automatically bundles new data.
