Archigos. A Data Base on Leaders 1875 - 2004. A collaborative effort with Kristian Skrede Gleditsch (University of Essex, UK) and Giacomo Chiozza (Vanderbilt). The Archigos data set is the winner of the 2014 Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award, sponsored by the APSA section on Comparative Politics.

  • Version 4.1, updated until 31 December 2015 is available. A Stata 14 version is downloadable here. The case descriptions have been updated to 1 January 2015--and now span almost 900 pages--and are available as well. (An older version of the codebook for Archigos Version 2.9 is available here.) We are grateful to the Political Instability Task Force for financial support and would like to thank amongst many others, Jeffrey Arnold, Belen Gonzalez, Ashley Leeds, Michaela Mattes, Sara Polo, Michael Ward, and Shu Yu for their scholarly support and efforts.
  • Version 2.9 (February 2009) -- which has the leader-spell as the unit of observation -- contains information on the date and manner of entry and exit of over 3,000 leaders 1875 - 2004 as well as their gender, birth- and death-date, previous times in office and their post-exit fate. For ease of use, we also provide a version of these data with time-varying records, where the unit of observation is the leader-year. (Upon request we can provide a list of changes to version 2.8.) Both data sets are in Stata format.
  • To introduce the data to the wider community we wrote "Introducing Archigos: A Data Set of Political Leaders," Journal of Peace Research, 46(2), (March) 2009: 269-183. This article describes some very basic but nonetheless interesting patterns. We would appreciate it if users would cite this article as their reference for the data.
  • I completed collecting data on election dates for leaders in Archigos for the period 1919 - 2006 (in cvs format). The file contains data for the earlier period 1900 - 1918 but I do not claim this is comprehensive or complete. This data is not yet integrated in Archigos. I would appreciate feedback on omissions, mistakes and addenda. An effort is underway to upgrade and extend this data, this upgraded version should become available by the late Fall of 2009.
  • We will continue to update and extend Archigos. Future versions will include a new variable which records whether a leader was related to a previous leader. In addition, future versions will offer finer-grained codings on how leaders entered and left office, as well as information on term limits.