Party Representation of Social Groups (PaReSoGo)

• Main Authors: Zelinska, Olga, Dubrow, Joshua K.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: Repozytorium Danych Społecznych 2021
• Subjects: Social Sciences; Political Parties; Gender; Age; Education; Immigration; Inequality; Social Groups; Party Representation; Surveys; Elections; European Social Survey; ParlGov; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.18150/NPXPAT

Parliament is a core institution to the political power structure. Parties and parliamentarians are responsible for expressing and translating the interests of "the people" in the legislature. Social groups with limited party representation in parliament are politically unequal to social groups with greater representation. Yet, scholars lack information to address research questions about how well social groups are represented in parliament across nations and time. The dataset “Party Representation of Social Groups” (PaReSoGo) contains a replicable and straightforward measure of the party representation of social groups per country and year from high-quality publicly available survey and administrative data. For survey data, we use the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002 - 2016 that contains items on sociodemographics, social attitudes, and retrospective vote choice, i.e. the party that the respondents said they voted for in the last general election. We aggregate the ESS items to the country and year level and match that distribution with the ParlGov data on the percentage of parliamentarians in each party in parliament per country and year. Our country-year measure is based on the idea of issue congruence measures that match distributions. In our data, this match is made via the Dissimilarity Index (DI). Here, the DI is a measure of distance in party representation between gender, age, education, intersectional, and attitudinal groups’ retrospective party vote choices and the distribution of parliamentarians in parties. This archived version of PaReSoGo contains 150 "straightforward" country years, which cover eight ESS rounds (2002-2016) and 95 national elections (1999-2016) across 25 countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. We also archive 51 country years which we consider ...