POLI 209 Research Methods in Public Affairs: Recommended Resources

This guide provides a great overview of defining a research topic and different types of research methods.

Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.

The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data.

Our World in Data is about Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. This page focuses on charts, but offers downloadable data in .csv format.

An international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community.

ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences.

Global Barometer Surveys (GBS) is the first comprehensive effort to measure, at a mass level, the current social, political, and economic atmosphere around the world. It provides an independent, non-partisan, multidisciplinary view of public opinion on a range of policy-relevant issues.

The home of the U.S. government's open data. Tools, and resources to conduct research, design data visualizations, etc.

International focus on various criminal justice topics.

Established in 1978, the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) archives and disseminates data on crime and justice for secondary analysis. The archive contains data from over 2,700 curated studies or statistical data series. NACJD is home to several large-scale and well known datasets, including the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN).

To serve the research needs of social scientists, teachers, students, policy makers and journalists, the ANES produces high quality data from its own surveys on voting, public opinion, and political participation.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.

Voting and registration data

Our lab supports advances in election science by collecting, analyzing, and sharing core data and findings. We also aim to build relationships with election officials and others to help apply new scientific research to the practice of democracy in the United States.

The Correlates of War (COW) project seeks to facilitate the collection, dissemination, and use of accurate and reliable quantitative data in international relations.