The European Government-Opposition Voters (EGOV) Data Set

Our codes provide a tool for researchers using any part of the integrated datasets of the European Social Survey (European Social Survey Cumulative File, ESS 1-9, 2020) project to easily differentiate between respondents based on their political affiliation, dividing them into pro-government and pro-opposition groups. Individuals are coded as “government supporters”, “opposition supporters” and “non-identifiers” according to their survey response, while we excluded refusals. The database includes data for 422 985 respondents from eight data rounds between 2002 and 2020 from 33 European countries, organized all in all in 215 country-years. <p>There are two data files attached. </p> <p>1. The “European Government-Opposition Voters (EGOV) Data Set” is a comma-separated values table (.csv format file) that includes three variables. </p> <p>a. The variable “votedforwinner” differentiates between government voters (1), opposition voters (0) and non-voters (missing values); thus it defines the government-opposition status of European voters based on their last vote on the previous election.</p> <p>b. The variable “closetowinner” differentiates between government partisans (1), opposition partisans (0) and non-partisans (missing values); thus it defines the government-opposition status of European party identifiers based on their partisan attachment.</p> <p>c. The variable “cseqno” is a unique identification number for European Social Survey (ESS) respondents included in the integrated data sets of the ESS project. </p> <p>2. The “EGOV – do file” is a do file that can be used to reproduce the content of the above table. These codes are annotated, that is, unusual changes in government composition and overlaps of elections and fieldwork periods are indicated.</p> <p>The European Government-Opposition Voters Data Set has been produced by using the following pieces of information coming from the (European Social Survey Cumulative File, ESS 1-9, 2020), Comparative Political Data Sets (Armingeon, Isler, Knöpfel, Weisstanner, et al., 2016) and ParlGov (Döring and Manow, 2019) data sets.</p> <p>- partisan preferences, that is, respondents’ vote on the last general election (164 variables, ESS) and respondents’ partisan identity (167 variables, ESS) </p> <p>- date of the interview (year, month, day, ESS)</p> <p>- date of national elections and investitures in each country-case (CPDS and ParlGov)</p> <p>- cabinet composition (CPDS and ParlGov)</p> <p>- official sites on information on national elections for clarification, if necessary</p>