The Heads of Government (HoG) dataset provides summary information about the ideological orientation of heads of government in 33 countries in Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region between 1870 and 2012.

Our coding of head-of-government ideology has two dimensions: on the one hand the economic dimension (we distinguish between “left,” “center,” and “right”); on the other hand the religious dimension (we distinguish between heads of government with an explicitly Christian platform and those without an explicitly Christian platform).

Head-of-Government Ideology by Regime Type

To following graphs provide a quick overview of the coding of the ideology of heads of government over time.

Head-of-Government Ideology by Country

The graph below is a representation of the head-of-government ideology coding for all countries in the sample.

The data

To give the reader of our (online) codebook the ability to quickly peruse our database, we are providing a quick way to search the database here.