International IDEA has created this unified database which incorporates data from previously separate databases and resources covering topics such as voter turnout, electoral system design, gender quotas, direct democracy and many more.
The major benefits of this change for International IDEA are to streamline and standardize our data collection, maintenance and presentation work. For our partners and target audiences it provides a standard search interface and workflow to access our data, so that website visitors do not need to learn a new system for every database.
Keeping the data up-to-date has been a major effort and with this new system we invite the community to help us maintain the high quality of data. If you see that we are missing data that you can provide, or you find data that is incorrect, missing sources or requires more explanation, please use the edit icon next to the text and fill in the “Edit data” form. We will review your submission as soon as possible and update the database. Like Wikipedia, we track all changes in a history so that we can track changes over time, undo changes if necessary and maintain up to date sources without losing previous versions.
All of the data collected by International IDEA and presented here is stored in a single database that has been designed specially for this site. The data stored is either text or numerical. For numerical data it is possible to receive simple statistical summaries like maximum or averages in your search results. In the advanced search page, you can request data from several different thematic areas (such as gender quotas and voter turnout) and filter by region and/or date.
We have prepared a special search page for each theme, which helps you to better search that particular sub-set of the database. Each search page has a “Preview” button that lets you check search results before exporting them to CSV or Excel format. There is also a “Screen view” which provides an intelligently grouped and simplified table view of data for those who want to quickly visualize the available data without performing their own data analysis.
