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 “complicated”, marked accordingly, including countries with complex electoral systems, when the survey data available and the final seat distribution in parliament cannot be directly compared, or in case of survey fieldwork problems.
For each country-year, we calculated the DI for all ESS respondents and selected social groups, including gender, age, education, intersections of gender and age, and attitudinal groups. Additionally, we calculated an election-to-fieldwork time distance and provided information on a card being shown in the ESS.
The archived data package consists of a summary table in .xls and .csv formats, the codebook, .xls files with raw calculations for each of the 150 "straightforward" country-years and accompanying .do files with the Stata code. We also include the summary table (.xls and .csv), DI calculations (.xls) and the code (.do) for the 51 “complicated” country-years. The codebook contains the data basics, the description of the methodology and of all variables, and detailed notes on DI calculations for every country, including an explanation of the complicated merges of the ESS and the ParlGov lists and the details on the electoral system in the country.
Suggested citation:
Zelinska, Olga and Joshua K. Dubrow. 2021. Party Representation of Social Groups (PaReSoGo) v.1.0. Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, funded by National Science Centre, Poland 2016/23/B/HS6/03916. Polish Social Data Archive.
(2021)
