The Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset covers all of the legislative and presidential elections that have taken place in democratic states from 1919 through 2020. It also continues to include information on all elections that are considered democratic by at least one of five different measures of regime type: Democracy and Dictatorship (DD), Freedom House (FH), Polity5, Boix-Miller-Rosato (BMR), and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The DES dataset provides information on electoral rules and party system size for 1,578 lower-house parliamentary and 602 first-round presidential elections in democracies. DES 5.0 covers all legislative and presidential elections that have taken place in democratic states from January 1, 1919, through December 31, 2020.
Note: The original values of -99 (the information is missing but should theoretically be available) and -88 (there is no single value for this particular variable) have been recoded to ''.'' (missing). In cases of multiple elections per year, we keep the data of the latest election.