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v-dem.net

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V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) provides a large, expert-coded dataset of democracy and governance indicators across countries and years, with multi-dimensional measures of political rights, civil liberties, and governance. The site offers downloadable data, visualizations, country profiles, methodological documentation, and API access for research and teaching.

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Comparative Constitutions Project

Research project coding the characteristics of every national constitution written since 1789, with downloadable datasets and the Constitute search tool. Users can compare provisions across 200-plus countries and trace how constitutional design has changed over time.

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Essentials of Comparative Politics

Patrick O'Neil's undergraduate textbook builds the comparative method: states, regimes, political economy, democracy and authoritarianism, with country cases. After it you can compare how different political systems distribute power and why institutions produce different outcomes.

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Political Geography

Coursera course: Comparative Political Systems

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Moral Foundations of Politics

Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro's lecture course on Enlightenment, utilitarian, Marxist, and social-contract answers to what makes a government legitimate. Students finish able to apply each tradition to contested questions about rights, distribution, and democracy.

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freedomhouse.org

Freedom House is a nonpartisan nonprofit that monitors democracy and human rights worldwide. The site offers country-by-country political rights and civil liberties assessments, annual rankings (Freedom in the World), and research on democracy, press freedom, and internet freedom.

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Patterns of Democracy

Lijphart compares thirty-six democracies to distinguish majoritarian from consensus systems, using measures of executive power, party systems, electoral rules and federalism. Readers learn how institutional configurations correlate with policy performance and minority representation.

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