The Parliaments and governments database (ParlGov) provides two key services: 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 and covers 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, 990 elections and 1600 cabinets. The database is maintained by Holger Döring and Philip Manow at the University of Bremen.

The dataset can be accessed here. We will introduce one of the available datasets on ParlGov: the cabinet-level data. You will then be able to complete an interactive exercises on government coalitions with this data.

Table 1: General Tasks

Tasks
Beyond obtaining basic facts about election outcomes and governments, what types of questions about governments in European democracies can we answer using ParlGov?
What constitutes the end of one government and the start of another? Parlgov offers one definition for determining the start and end dates of cabinets, but there are others. How might you change Parlgov’s criteria and why?

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 6.

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 allow linking 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	2015-09-20	ANEL	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	1	0	10	300
Greece	2015-09-20	EK	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	0	0	9	300
Greece	2015-09-20	KKE	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	0	0	15	300
Greece	2015-09-20	LS-CA	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	0	0	18	300
Greece	2015-09-20	ND	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	0	0	75	300
Greece	2015-09-20	PASOK	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	0	0	17	300
Greece	2015-09-20	SYRIZA	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	1	1	145	300
Greece	2015-09-20	TP	2015-09-21	Tsipras II	0	0	11	300
Greece	2015-09-20	ANEL	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	5	300
Greece	2015-09-20	EK	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	8	300
Greece	2015-09-20	KKE	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	15	300
Greece	2015-09-20	LS-CA	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	18	300
Greece	2015-09-20	ND	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	75	300
Greece	2015-09-20	PASOK	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	17	300
Greece	2015-09-20	SYRIZA	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	1	1	145	300
Greece	2015-09-20	TP	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	10	300
Greece	2015-09-20	none	2019-01-13	Tsipras III	0	0	7	300
Greece	2019-07-07	EL	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr	0	0	10	300
Greece	2019-07-07	KKE	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr	0	0	15	300
Greece	2019-07-07	MR25	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr	0	0	9	300
Greece	2019-07-07	ND	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr	1	1	158	300
Greece	2019-07-07	PASOK	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr	0	0	22	300
Greece	2019-07-07	SYRIZA	2019-07-08	Mitsotakis Kyr	0	0	86	300