Global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world. HQ in South Africa & members in over 175 countries. Key publication since 2017 has been Civicus Monitor, which tracks the state of civic freedoms in countries around the world

Independent, non-profit organization, based in Brussels, researching the challenges posed by increasing political populism

Presents an overview of the state of democracy around the globe today. See especially its Freedom in the World comparative & historical data. Free reports online assess civil liberties and political rights, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion, both for specific countries and around the world generally. Includes its flagship Freedom in the World reports 1998- (or as dataset from 1973-) and Freedom of the Press reports 2002- (or as dataset from 1980-) and Freedom on the Net (2012 -).

An international organisation of parliaments of sovereign states which seeks to promote parliamentary democracy and dialogue. PARLINE is the IPU's parliamentary database which provides information on national parliaments worldwide. Also data (from 1997-) on women in national parliaments.
More recently, IPU with UNDP has developed Indicators for Democratic Parliaments - https://www.parliamentaryindicators.org/ - to help assess the capacity & performance of parliaments

Free access to publications and a number of databases, including: Direct Democracy ; Electoral Justice ; Electoral Management ; Electoral System Design ; Gender Quotas ; ICT in Elections ; Political Finance ; State of Democracy Assessments ; Voter Turnout ; Voting From Abroad.

Organisation supporting democracy, political participation, elections and good governance in countries around the world.

UK based foundation founded 2001 by Anthony Barnett. Global interest in social and political issues, aims to challenge power, uphold human rights and encourage democratic debate

Global network and crowdsourcing platform of political participation/innovation, funded by the Canadian Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council. Focus on democratic organisation (practices or institutions that potentially advance ideals of self-government) and innovative organisations or practices. Aims to mobilise knowledge about democracy-enhancing practices and institutions

Golder & Bormann's DES version 3.0 covers all of the legislative and presidential elections in democratic states from 1946 through 2016.

Swiss effort, details of referendums back to 1790.

Seeks to measure democracy globally across all countries. Annual indices and analysis from 2007-

Useful introduction with links to data sources.

Global coverage 1810-2000, used as the basis for the author's books.

Highly regarded large-scale international project (HQ at Goteborg University, Sweden), offering publications, including annual report on state of democracy around the world. Underlying dataset covers all countries, earliest data from 1789. 450 indicators underpin 5 over-arching indices: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
Data is summarised in an annual publication (2017-) called Democracy Report

Events data between and within nations for the period 1990-2004. Extracted from Reuters news sources by Gary King & Will Lowe, and coded according from around 200 typologies of events/actions. Exact date of event is recorded

Largescale database especially useful for more historical events data (currently covers 1945-2019). Events data is collected from news reports from the following sources: New York Times, the BBC Monitoring's Summary of World Broadcasts, the Wall Street Journal, and the CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Includes protest events (category 14).

Massive project to comprehensively monitor news media around the world (over 100 languages) and make available very large datasets requiring big data analysis. Current databases are listed here and include:
GDELT 1.0 & GDELT 2.0 event data 1979-
American Television July 2009-
Africa & the Middle East academic literature 1950-2012
Human Rights Knowledge Graph 1960-2014
Historical American Books Archive 1800-2015
Visual Global Knowledge Graph December 2015-

Developed by Lockheed Martin, see https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/capabilities/research-labs/advanced-technology-labs/icews.html
Large-scale recording of events around the world to forecast future potential political crises. iData on Harvard Dataverse contains events data 1995-2023, superseded by POLECAT

Successor project to ICEWS for weekly political events data, currently 2018- (with plans to extend back to 2010)

Potentially useful data set comprising data on destabilising events such as coups, revolutions and political and economic upheaval, derived from global news sources, by the Cline Center, University of Illinois. Coverage is 1945-2005.

Project makes available political violence & protest data for developing countries (from 1997 to present for Africa, more recent for Asia & Middle East). Main categories: Violence against civilians ; Battles ; Remote violence ; Riots & protests ; Strategic developments

The ESS is a respected survey held every 2 years. Survey themes change, but core questions apply to all rounds. For political protest see especially: B16 pressure groups; B18 petitions; B19 demonstrations; B20 boycotts.

Data collected by Jonathan Powell & Clayton Thyne. Coup data also available from INSCR and the SPEED database

GLOCON is an EU funded database that records protest event data, including but not limited to demonstrations, rallies, strikes, clashes, and political violence. Data coverage using local sources for India, Brazil, South Africa, Turkey, and Argentina (date coverage varies between countries). Updated annually. Hosted at Koc University, Turkey.

Freely available datasets include:
Forcibly Displaced Populations, 1964-2008 Major Episodes of Political Violence, 1946- Political Instability Task Force (PITF), State Failure Problem Set, 1955-
High Casualty Terrorist Bombings, 1989- Memberships in Conventional Intergovernmental Organisations (CIO), 1952-1997
Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800- (Polity IV Project)
Coups d'Etat, 1946-
State Fragility Index and Matrix, 1995-

Shares knowledge and resources regarding non-violent campaigns of civil resistance.

NAVCO 1.3 is a global dataset 1900-2019 containing over 600 campaigns. Compiled by Erica Chenoweth (Harvard University) & colleagues. Periodically updated. See the author's website for further datasets -
https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research

Case Western University project offers access to digitized materials that help bring to life the movement’s massive scale, grassroots nature and enduring impact. They include ephemera, leaflets, protest meeting organisation notes from Occupy Wall Street and more

EU funded project, researchers collected protest events data for EU27 +3 countries, 2000-2015.

Longstanding project from the Center for Systemic Peace offering extensive data on regime type & regime changes 1800-
The Polity project has a major advantage for relating changes in institutions to events since it provides dates for all changes, while many alternative data sources offer only annual data.

Compiled by Benjamin Acosta, covers over 500 organisations from 1940-2014, and tracks organization attributes, command structures, alliances with states and non-state actors, adversary attributes, levels of violence, levels of nonviolent demonstration, interaction strategies, with annual tracking of key variables

International collaborative research project exploring 20th century anti-colonial, anti-imperial and related left periodicals of the Global South. Outputs include a directory of key publications, browsable by geography, date, theme, language

SCAD focuses on protests, riots, strikes, inter-communal conflict, government violence against civilians, and other forms of social conflict not systematically tracked in other conflict datasets. SCAD currently covers social conflicts from 1990-2017, covering all of Africa, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean

Compilation by Michael Biggs (University of Oxford) of some useful datasets.

Based on the PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conflict dataset, with codings for ethnic/secessionist conflicts 1946-2010

Tanja Ellingsen's data on ethnic, religious, and linguistic characteristics for a global sample of states 1945-1994. See also the Composition of Ethnic & Religious Groups (CREG) data from the Cline Center, University of Illinois. Covers over 100 countries from 1940s onwards.

The well-known Ethnic Power Relations dataset identifies all politically relevant ethnic groups and their access to state power in all countries from 1946 onwards. It includes over 800 groups and codes the degree to which their representatives held executive-level power—from total control of government to overt political discrimination. New coding markers distinguish group members by religion, language, race, etc. Additional datasets provide geospatial data; ethnic conflict data; transborder ethnic data; linguistic, racial & ethnic cleavages of groups; ethnicity of refugees

Originally collected by Ted Robert Gurr, this major project & dataset tracks around 300 politically active ethnic minorities around the world since 1945.

Positions itself as the leading knowledge repository on the radical right, past and present.

Based at University of Oslo, this major collaborative effort offers a useful Compendium, Publications and the RTV (Right-Wing Terrorism & Violence in Western Europe) dataset. Main focus is Norway and Europe