EGOV: European Government-Opposition Voter Classifications, 2002-2020

From 2002 to 2020, this dataset classifies 422,985 survey respondents from 33 European countries as government or opposition supporters based on their last vote and partisan identity. It was created by Veronika Patkós using integrated data from the European Social Survey, Comparative Political Data Sets, and ParlGov. The data is organized across 215 country-years and includes a reproducible do file with annotations for unusual government changes.

Use Cases

• Modeling voter alignment and government-opposition dynamics based on the 'votedforwinner' and 'closetowinner' variables.
• Analyzing trends in partisan identification and non-identification across European countries and over time.
• Studying the relationship between electoral outcomes, cabinet composition, and voter preferences using the annotated election and fieldwork data.

Strengths

• Contains classifications for 422,985 respondents, providing a substantial sample size.
• Covers 33 European countries across eight data rounds from 2002 to 2020, offering broad temporal and geographic scope.
• Includes reproducible code (a do file) with annotations for unusual political events, which aids transparency.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the description after download.
• Row count for the primary data file is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

European Social Survey (ESS 1-9, 2020), Comparative Political Data Sets, ParlGov

Collection Method

Derived from survey responses and linked to external data on elections and cabinet composition.

Time Range

2002-2020

Geography

33 European countries