WhoGov Dataset

The WhoGov dataset is described in our article: Nyrup, Jacob and Stuart Bramwell. 2020. Who Governs? A New Global Dataset on Members of Cabinets, American Political Science Review, 114(4), 1366-1374. WhoGov won the 2021 Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba award for best dataset in comparative politics.

The dataset enables researchers to take a new approach to studying governing elites in autocracies and democracies. We provide bibliographic information, such as gender and party affiliation, on cabinet members in July every year in the period 1966-2025 in all countries with a population of more than 400,000 citizens. In total, the dataset contains data on 60,458 cabinet members in 177 countries, adding up to 9,495 country-years.

WhoGov makes it possible to answer questions such as: what is the share of female cabinet members globally, which type of regime has the highest cabinet turnover, and have cabinets increased in size over time? And many others. The dataset is highly flexible and can be used to calculate countless variables of interest, including the number of female ministers, ministerial experience, cabinet turnover and cabinet size at the country-year level.

The team is continuously working on updating the data with more years and more variables. We released version 4 of the dataset in June 2026, which covers all countries up to 2025.  This update was supported by UiO:Democracy. Furthermore, a team based at the University of Oslo have built the Paths to Power dataset, which expands the dataset with variables on social background, education and occupation. It can be found here: Paths to Power (PtP) - Department of Political Science.

We are hosting a WhoGov workshop on political elites on the 20th and 21st of August 2026 at the University of Oslo. The deadline is April 1st 2026. The call for papers is now closed and the program will be released in July 2026.

For enquiries or if you identify any errors, contact: whogov@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.