Database of Ranking Data in Political Science
Across scientific disciplines, researchers use ranking data to study people’s comparative judgments, preferences, and decision-making over a range of items, from medical treatments to political values. Yet existing data repositories have largely overlooked the rich and diverse ranking data collected and analyzed in social science research.
To bridge the gap, we introduce a database of standardized rankings based on various studies from leading political science journals. Our first release covers 52 datasets from 28 original studies published between 2005 and 2025.
Our database demonstrates notable variation in substantive topics and forms of ranking data that go well beyond canonical examples of candidate evaluations and value orientations, enabling researchers to perform comparative analyses, replication, reanalysis, methodological evaluation, and new substantive research with real-world political rankings.
Download
The complete database is available as a single ZIP file.
Note: Some entries for “ranking” may appear as dates or evaluated values depending on the set-up of your Excel tools. However, these are not errors contained in our database.
Codebook
The guide to our database is available as a single codebook.
Manuscript
For the details about data collection, see our associated manuscript.