Data

I am responsible for developing the Quality of Government (QoG) Institute datasets and overseeing the work of the QoG data, an open data platform on corruption and other societal indicators.

Within QoG I am leading the project Lo-QoG (the Local Quality of Government dataset: A hub for local societal indicators across Europe), funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond 2023-2027. This endeavor aims to collect, harmonize and publicize statistics on municipal-like units across Europe, to meet the demand for local data. The ambition is to provide researchers and the public with relevant data on a very fine-grained level that is free and accessible. We have a methods-oriented working paper in progress, titled “The Local Map of Europe: Municipal Boundary Changes, 2014-2024” (with Y. Rodionova, V. Saidi Phiri, R. Lopez Valverde, M. Nistotskaya and T. Köhler). The project also organizes a workshop in May 2026 to gather experts on local-level data in Europe.

I lead one of the six modules in Demscore, an infrastructure (generously funded by the Swedish Research Council) that innovate by providing free data from several of the world’s largest datasets on Democracy, Social Policy, Conflict, and Representation through one coherent platform.

Together with colleagues in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, I launched the ‘Women’s Political Empowerment Index’, a set of data that is free for the public to download and use (see also Sundström et al. 2017). 

I am also providing open data on age group representation in politics (with Daniel Stockemer). The Worldwide Age Representation in Parliaments (WARP) dataset (www.warpdataset.com), provides information about age groups’ numerical presence in lower house parliaments, spanning across the globe and over time. It contains over 800 elections in 150 countries.