Welcome to PolPaL

Political Party Links

Political Party Links (PolPaL) is a linkage key infrastructure project for the social sciences. PolPaL provides a unified linkage platform for identifying political entities across social science datasets.

PolPaL, inspired by Party Facts (see Relation to Party Facts), provides new linkage features, broader metadata, and extended coverage. It offers researchers a comprehensive, consistent, and long-term foundation for studying political entities globally and historically.

Dem

B90/Gr

SWAPO

PRONA

SAP

M5S

First look

A glimpse of what's coming

PolPaL homepage showing statistics and dataset overview — Homepage
The homepage of PolPaL provides an overview of statistics, latest news, and a searchable dataset index.

PolPaL projects page showing ongoing and completed projects — External Data
The projects page provides an overview of integrated data projects, datasets, and data versions within PolPaL.

Entity detail page for The Left — PolPaL Party Entity pages
The PolPaL Party entity page provides information about political parties and their appearances across datasets.

Entity detail page for CDU/CSU — PolPaL Grouping Entity pages
The PolPaL Grouping entity page provides information about political groupings and their appearances across datasets.

Dataset linkage view for CHES Austria entries — Dataset explorer
Browse linkages between dataset entries and PolPaL entities.

Dataset download view — Download page
Download linkage keys, PolPaL entities, and additional information from PolPaL.

Integration roadmap

Data Projects & Datasets

The following datasets are planned for integration over the coming months. Each will be linked to PolPaL entities, making cross-dataset analysis straightforward.

Highlighted datasets are prioritized for early integration, based on usages by Party Facts users.

AfroAfrobarometer ARPDAutocratic Ruling Parties Dataset CHESChapel Hill Expert Survey CHISOLSChange in Source of Leader Support CMPComparative Manifesto Project CSESComparative Study of Electoral Systems DPIDatabase of Political Institutions EESEuropean Election Studies EPACEthnonationalism in Party Competition ESSEuropean Social Survey EU-NEDEuropean NUTS-Level Election Database EVSEuropean Values Study GPDGlobal Populism Database GPSGlobal Party Survey MAPPMembers and Activists of Political Parties NEDNational Elections Database OPAMEDOne-Party Membership Dataset ParlGovParties and Governments PFParty Facts POLCONPolitical Constraint Index Dataset POPPAPopulism and Political Parties Expert Survey PopuListThe PopuList PPDBPolitical Party Database REPDEMRepresentative Democracy Data Archive THEAThe Elections Archive V-DemVarieties of Democracy WhoGovWho Governs? WVSWorld Values Survey

If you would like to contribute or suggest a dataset, please feel free to reach out to us.

How to Contribute

Become a Part of PolPaL

PolPaL is a collaborative effort, and we welcome contributions from researchers across the social sciences. We are always looking for political party researchers that can help us expand our dataset and improve our linkage key infrastructure.

Contribute to PolPaL — Contribute as Individual Researcher
Support our team and help build a comprehensive linkage key infrastructure for the social sciences.

If you would like to contribute or integrate your dataset, please feel free to reach out to us.

The team

Who we are

Lea Kaftan

GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

lea.kaftan@gesis.org

Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8
50667 Cologne
Germany

Paul Bederke

GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

paul.bederke@gesis.org

Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8
50667 Cologne
Germany

Background

Relation to Party Facts

Party Facts (Döring & Regel 2019) has made invaluable contributions to linking parties across a wide variety of datasets. We build upon the Party Facts’ core data model (Bederke, Döring, & Regel, 2023) and extend it in several important ways.

We acknowledge that core parties, or PolPaL entities, are oftentimes linked to each other in meaningful ways, e.g., when they are part of the same alliance or when one is the predecessor or successor of another party. With PolPaL, users can discover these links between parties without having to conduct additional research themselves and take them into account when merging according to their use case.

In addition, we add a temporal dimension to mitigate issues with differences in the way in which datasets treat party splits and mergers. For example, one dataset might provide information on the German PDS/Left, treating it as one party, while another will provide information on the PDS and the Left separately, treating the Left as the successor of the PDS. In PolPaL, dataset observations for political parties can now be associated with multiple PolPaL IDs across different points in time.

We rely on Party Facts’ core parties (Bederke, Döring, & Regel, 2023) as a starting point. For the initial list of PolPaL entities, the PolPaL ID is identical to the Party Facts ID. We include their names (short name, English name, original name), their Party Facts ID, the assigned Wikipedia URL, and their country, if applicable, as given in Party Facts. Moreover, we integrated Party Facts as an external dataset, allowing users to easily link PolPaL entities back to Party Facts core parties.

https://partyfacts.herokuapp.com/
Döring, H., & Regel, S. (2019). Party Facts: A database of political parties worldwide. Party Politics, 25(2), 97–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068818820671
Bederke, Paul; Döring, Holger; Regel, Sven, 2023, "Party Facts – Version 2023", Harvard Dataverse, V1. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TJINLQ