PDYi will work on the most recent version of all main desktop browsers including

• Google Chrome
• Firefox 3.6 and above
• Microsoft Edge

Yes. You can access the PDYi on leading smart phones or tablets with a screen width of 960 pixels or higher.

From the home page select a country from the country list.
From the chart page, select your country of interest from the 'Country' drop-down.

For each country, a drop-down list of data types available is given in the 'category' box.

You can view the following data (where available):

• Parliamentary election data - How many votes parties received and how many seats they won by actual numbers or percentages, for parliamentary lower houses and, where available, for parliamentary upper houses.
• EU election data - How many votes parties received and how many seats they won in European Parliament elections.
• Presidential election data - Actual vote numbers and percentages for presidential candidates in first and second rounds.
• Voter turnout figures for each type of election - the actual number voter and turnout (voters as a percentage of the overall electorate).
• Ministries data - a full roster of the leaders of all cabinet ministries and other cabinet posts identified by name, political party, gender and age and overall summaries of cabinet composition.

Depending on the nature of the data, charts are available both as stacked bar charts and as line graphs.

Use the 'parties/candidates' tab to select and deselect parties or candidates by name. Deselected parties/candidates will disappear from the graph until you reselect them. Use the 'adjust' tab to select and deselect other criteria:

• show election results as seats or votes
• select year range
• hide or show parties within a certain range of votes or seats
• hide or show specific ministerial positions

Use the % and # buttons above the chart to toggle between percentage and actual number.
Use the line chart and bar graph buttons above the chart to toggle between these two options (where data permits).

Zoom in by selecting the area that you want to see in greater detail. You can then press the 'Reset zoom' button to zoom out and select other areas of interest.

You can export the entire dataset for a country by clicking on the 'Export all country data as XLSX' link in the horizontal toolbar at the top. The full datasets are annotated with footnotes (added as 'comments' within the XLSX file) and many country datasets also include additional available information such as referendum results, or local and regional election results.

You can export a partial dataset i.e. only the data type you are currently viewing, by clicking on the 'Export this data as CSV' link in the horizontal toolbar at the top.

PDYi contains data on parliamentary lower houses and cabinet ministers as well as upper house, EU and presidential election results in countries which hold such elections. PDYi contains data for all of the EU member states, plus Australia, Canada, Iceland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States. The data for most cases goes back as far as the early 1990s and is updated annually.

PDYi links directly to annual summaries and analysis of elections, cabinet changes and other political events contained in the Political Data Yearbook country chapters.

From January 2026, all authored summaries covering the year 2025 onwards are available open access on Cambridge Core.

Cambridge Core and Wiley Online Library both host articles covering the year 2024 and earlier. Wiley customers with multi-year access rights extending beyond 2025, or perpetual access rights, will still be able to access via the Wiley platform.

PDY is part of the Cambridge University Press sale package, therefore customers will gain access to the paywalled content in the archive as they renew their agreements. Non-subscribers can also purchase 'pay-per-view' access to individual articles.

The datasets and country chapters of the Political Data Yearbook are created annually by a carefully-chosen group of scholars with in-depth country-level expertise. Biographies for each country expert can be found on the on the PDY and PDYi homepages.

Please see our Contributor page.