We are delighted to announce that the Political Data Yearbook interactive (PDYi) – a free resource – is now live online! Visit http://www.politicaldatayearbook.com/ to find out more.
The EJPR Political Data Yearbook has long been regarded as the journal-of-record for annual political data and analysis, and the PDYi brings the last 20 years of data alive in an easy-to-use, interactive and graphically-rich format that works on computers, tablets and even smartphones. Following in the footsteps of the print and online editions of the PDY (which will continue to provide strong contextual analysis to help readers understand what the data means), the PDYi will become a go-to source for data on elections, parliaments and governments in the world's advanced industrial democracies.
Transforming two decades of printed PDY articles into an online database has been a rich and complex process that ECPR members and PDY readers may find relevant for their own data-management projects. Beginning in 2011, the co-editors of the PDY—Daniele Caramani, Kevin Deegan-Krause and Rainbow Murray—worked with a large team of PDY chapter authors, colleagues and graduate and undergraduate students to extract data from each of the 600 PDY chapters written during the last two decades, to clean and organize it and to weave it together into a single comprehensive database. The data extraction alone required the project leaders to develop a standardized framework for over 20 kinds of data from 36 countries, each with its own unique and changing political system and then to fill the framework with data from files in a wide variety of formats (including some that were merely photographs of old issues). The next challenge was to string these snapshots into a coherent moving picture of political change over time.
The resulting database includes hundreds of thousands of data points across multiple dimensions including upper and lower house and EU election votes and seats, presidential votes, government seats and even a day-by-day account of the heads of government ministries, a resource that does not exist in any other available database.
While scholars were extracting the data, project managers, designers, and web experts at Wiley Blackwell were working with the PDY editors to develop the best possible user interface. To make sure that the final product would meet all the needs of users, this process included in-person focus group, telephone interviews with sample end-users and many rounds of testing with PDY country authors and a wide range of likely users.
The resulting website offers a simple and quick interface for looking at election returns, parliamentary seats, turnout, and an innovative display for looking at the heads of individual ministries (along with gender, age and party) and at statistics for the composition of each government. Users can now select to view data by country and produce graphs to show election results by party over time, in terms of votes or seats, by percentage and by actual numbers. Thresholds can be adjusted and users can zoom in to see more detail. The home page screen also includes information about the individual country experts, and links through to the EJPR Political Data Yearbook for further details and analysis, as well as a direct link to the original source files, which include footnotes and additional data such as referendums and parliamentary changes collected by the PDY authors for specific countries.
Although the data team and country authors are still in the process of uploading and scrutinizing the remaining data sets, the PDYi will follow the practice of a ‘beta’ release so that our most eager users can begin to make use of the site and its data right away. On behalf of the entire PDYi development team, we would like to thank all who have been involved over the last two years in providing feedback on the plans and prototypes. If you have any further feedback or ideas for future development, please contact us at the email addresses below.
