The Global Leadership Project: A Comprehensive Database of Political Elites

53 Pages Posted: 6 Sep 2014

See all articles by John Gerring

John Gerring

University of Texas at Austin

Erzen Oncel

Boston University - Department of Political Science

Kevin Morrison

University of Pittsburgh - Graduate School of Public & International Affairs

Philip Keefer

Inter-American Development Bank

Date Written: September 1, 2014

Abstract

Contributing to the recent revival in studies of the effects of the biographical characteristics of leaders, this paper presents an attempt at the most complete description to date of the world’s current leaders. The Global Leadership Project (GLP) provides the first dataset offering biographical information on leaders of most countries in the world, including members of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, and other elites whose power is of an informal nature. GLP encompasses 146 sovereign and semisovereign nation-states and 40,566 leaders, each of whom is coded along 33 parameters, producing approximately 1.2 million data points in a cross-sectional format centered on 2010-13. This paper describes the coding process and the resulting data, and compares the characteristics of leaders across offices within countries, across countries, and across regions.

Keywords: leaders, data

Suggested Citation

Gerring, John and Oncel, Erzen and Morrison, Kevin and Keefer, Philip, The Global Leadership Project: A Comprehensive Database of Political Elites (September 1, 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2491672 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2491672

John Gerring

University of Texas at Austin ( email )

2317 Speedway
Austin, TX Texas 78712
United States

Erzen Oncel

Boston University - Department of Political Science ( email )

United States

Kevin Morrison (Contact Author)

University of Pittsburgh - Graduate School of Public & International Affairs ( email )

Pittsburgh, PA 15260-0001
United States

Philip Keefer

Inter-American Development Bank ( email )

1300 New York Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20577
United States
202-623-1961 (Phone)

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