The ParlGov Dataset

The Parliaments and governments database (ParlGov) project provides a website that serves as an encyclopedia of elections, parties and cabinets and corresponding ready-to-use datasets that can be easily integrated with other datasets for research projects. The main homepage can be found here here and provides data for all elections, cabinets and parties in all EU countries and most OECD democracies. All in all the website has 37 countries, with around 1700 parties, 1000 elections and 1600 cabinets. The database is maintained by Holger Döring, Constantin Huber, and Philip Manow. You can find an interactive version of the website here.

The dataset can be accessed here. We will introduce one of the available datasets on ParlGov: the cabinet-level data. While reading, please keep in mind the questions you see below and answer them once you reached the end. In the end, we will provide a link to a platform with an interactive version of the dataset and additional tasks.

Table 1: General Tasks for the Dataset

Tasks
Has the ideological range of governments increased in recent years? What are possible implications of the range between government parties?
What share of government seats are held by rightwing parties?

Dataset Description

ParlGov provides data in multiple datasets. The three main ones are cabinet-level data, election-level data and party data. The election and party level datasets have already been described in the online material for chapter 8.

Cabinet-Level Data

The cabinet level dataset provides information on all parties in parliament (government and opposition) for each cabinet (the unit of analysis is therefore a parliamentary party during a cabinet). ParlGov defines a new cabinet whenever a government party changes, a new head of government is chosen, a general election is held or a meaningful member (or several members) of the government resign. This means that during one parliamentary term (between two elections), there can be several cabinets. For each cabinet-party observation in the data, the dataset includes an indicator if the party was part of the cabinet or not, whether it was the party of the prime minister, and if the cabinet as a whole was a caretaker government. In addition, we find information about the parties, including the number of seats in parliament, the party name, and the left-right position. Finally (as for all datasets), ParlGov includes identification variables that allo to link the dataset to all other datasets on elections and parties from ParlGov. Table 2 shows an excerpt of the data from three recent cabinets in Greece.

Table 2: Variables in the Cabinet dataset

country_name	election_date	party_name_short	start_date	cabinet_name	cabinet_party	prime_minister	seats	election_seats_total
Greece	2019-07-07	EL	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr I	0	0	10	300
Greece	2019-07-07	KKE	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr I	0	0	15	300
Greece	2019-07-07	MeRA25	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr I	0	0	9	300
Greece	2019-07-07	ND	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr I	1	1	158	300
Greece	2019-07-07	PASOK	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr I	0	0	22	300
Greece	2019-07-07	SYRIZA	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr I	0	0	86	300
Greece	2023-05-21	EL	2023-05-25	Sarmas	0	0	16	300
Greece	2023-05-21	KKE	2023-05-25	Sarmas	0	0	26	300
Greece	2023-05-21	ND	2023-05-25	Sarmas	0	0	146	300
Greece	2023-05-21	PASOK	2023-05-25	Sarmas	0	0	41	300
Greece	2023-05-21	SYRIZA	2023-05-25	Sarmas	0	0	71	300
Greece	2023-05-21	none	2023-05-25	Sarmas	1	1	0	300
Greece	2023-06-25	EL	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	12	300
Greece	2023-06-25	KKE	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	21	300
Greece	2023-06-25	LE|PE	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	8	300
Greece	2023-06-25	ND	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	1	1	158	300
Greece	2023-06-25	Niki	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	10	300
Greece	2023-06-25	PASOK	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	32	300
Greece	2023-06-25	SYRIZA	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	47	300
Greece	2023-06-25	Sp	2023-06-26	Mitsotakis Kyr II	0	0	12	300

We conclude by showing two analyses that can be done using the Parlgov cabinet data. First, we can measure the ideological range between the two most extreme parties in each coalition across the countries in the dataset. In Figure 1, we plot this measure over time using the left-right position that is included in the Parlgov database. Of course, we could expand on this considerably by taking the size of parties into account or measuring their ideological positions multi-dimensionally.

Second, we combine the cabinet dataset with the party dataset from Parlgov and record the share of government seats held by ‘right-wing’ parties. These parties might be called “radical right” or “extreme right” in other datasets. According to Parlgov, they “classify parties into families by their position in an economic (state/market) and a cultural (liberty/authority) left/right dimension.” This leads to some diversions form other datasets: Neither PiS in Poland nor the SVP in Switzerland are coded as “right-wing”, but rather “conservative” and “agrarian” respectively. Nevertheless, Figure 2 shows the increase in the share of seats held by right-wing government parties across Europe.