How did democracies organize elections during the interwar period? This data note introduces a significant update to the Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) data, expanding its scope to cover the years 1919 to 1945. The dataset encompasses 243 legislative lower house and presidential elections across 34 interwar democracies, providing a comprehensive resource for researchers studying electoral systems and democratic institutions. The DES data includes variables capturing the institutional rules governing elections, summary statistics of electoral outcomes, and democracy classifications from four major democracy datasets. This allows users to analyze the relationship between electoral rules, political outcomes, and democracy classifications, while choosing their preferred democracy definition. The updated DES data is fully compatible with prior releases for the post-war period, enabling longitudinal analysis of electoral systems across different eras. The dataset also includes multiple identification variables to facilitate linking with a wide range of other datasets, making it a valuable tool for interdisciplinary research in political science, history, and related fields. The study contributes to a wide body of social science research.
As an article published in Open Research Europe, a journal focused on facilitating open access research across various disciplines, the data note aligns with the journal’s goal of promoting data sharing and transparency in social science research. The dataset will be useful to researchers across social sciences.