Political Science Research Guide
Use this guide to find information and research on topics in the field of political science
Data Sets-United States
- American Factfinder This link opens in a new windowAmerican FactFinder has been discontinued. This link will go to Data.gov, where the same information is available.
- American National Election StudiesData on voting, public opinion, and political participation to serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists
- Data.govHome of the US government’s open data and includes Federal, state and local data, tools, and resources to conduct research, build apps, design data visualizations, and more.
- General Social Survey (NORC)Contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings.
- IQSS (Institute for Qualitative Social Science at Harvard) Dataverse NetworkLinks to a large collection of social science research data
- Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social ResearchSearch for words or phrases in the title field, by investigator, by study number or in all fields of this huge collection of data sets at the University of Michigan. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a member of ICPSR.
- Roper Dataset This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Opinion survey data files for secondary analysis, from Gallup, ABC, CBS, AP, Pew, Harris, and elsewhere
- State Data CenterCooperative program between the states and the Census Bureau that was created in 1978 to make data available locally to the public through a network of state agencies, universities, libraries, and regional and local governments
- U.S. GeocoderGeocoding service with an online lookup tool and an API (free to use for academic research – contact the company directly). Also provides jurisdiction maps, legislative officeholders, and census geography.
- UMass GIS HubLearn about GIS and use one of the many tools available for the UMass community.
Data Sets-International
- Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) PortalGateway to many kinds of research data and metadata, including sociological surveys, election studies, longitudinal studies, opinion polls, and census data
- World Bank Research Data SetsResearchers compiled these datasets for the World bank, which provides them free to encourage the creation of new knowledge.
