Resources

Note that data and code associated with specific papers and projects are listed with each publication.

Practical Resources

LaTex Resources – A selection of resources for writing in LaTex.

Visualization Resources – A selection of resources for data visualization, especially in R.

Environmental Regulatory Trackers

Regulatory [Rollback] Tracker at Harvard Law School – Originally dedicated to tracking environmental regulatory rollbacks under the Trump Administration; now dedicated to tracking “the Biden administration’s steps to advance clean energy deployment and environmental protection.” Detailed and relatively up-to-date information on federal-level environmentally-themed regulatory and legal actions.

Federal Environmental Justice Tracker at Harvard Law School – “Designed to provide up-to-date information on the Biden administration’s environmental justice commitments, and progress made on those commitments.”

Brookings Deregulatory Tracker – Like the Regulatory Rollback Tracker at Harvard Law, except Brookings-led effort has a wider scope: it aimed to cataloged all “deregulatory” efforts under the Trump Administration, across policy domains, and now tracks “regulatory changes in the Biden era.” The effort is affiliated with the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets. Not always entirely up to date.

Environmental Data & Governance Initiative – Formed in 2016 out of concerns about the degradation and erasure of environmental data produced and made public by the U.S. Government. EDGI focuses on four core areas: “1) archiving vulnerable environmental data, 2) monitoring changes to information about the environment, energy, and climate on federal websites, 3) interviewing federal employees about threats and changes to environmental health agencies, and 4) imagining, conceptualizing, and moving toward Environmental Data Justice.” Relative to other regulatory trackers formed when Trump was elected in 2016, EDGI has retained a more critial stance under the Biden Adminstration.

Climate Change Litigation – A great database on litigation related to climate change, both in the United States and abroad, hosted by The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia.

Data and Resources Relevant for Research on Germany and Europe

datorium – An incredible repository of datasets relevant to social scientific research on Germany and Europe. Hosted by the Leibniz Institute for Social Research (Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften).

Soziopolis – A clearinghouse of news, events, reviews, calls for papers, and so on for sociology and related disciplines in German-speaking countries. (in German)

International and Comparative Data and Resources

Comparative Agendas Project – A large, multi-national research effort focused on policy and politics in (at present) 23 nations plus the EU and two individual U.S. states (Florida and Pennsylvania). Aims for consistent and comparable measurement and dissemination of data related to 20 topics and 200+ subtopics.

Varieties of Democracy Project – A large, multi-national project focused on measuring the qualitative features of democracy around the world. Freely available data include 202 countries, 450+ “V-Dem indicators,” 81 indices, and 5 high-level indices for years ranging from 1789-present.

Global Regulation – A database of laws around the world. Subscription based. Provides superficial (and probably not very meaningful) “analytics” of law in a comparative context, but is nonetheless useful for identifying important laws in different nation-states.

U.S.-Focused Data and Resources

Congressional Bills Project – “This public resource provides information about more than 400,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress, currently 1947-2008, along with extensive information about each bill’s progress and sponsor.”

NLCD – Sociologists and policy scholars do not think much about land and nature very much, but of course social processes unfold in and across space and through biophysical land. The National Land Cover Database provides a comprehensive account of land cover—and land cover change—in the lower 48 states of the U.S. from 2001 to 2016.

RIBITS – The Regulatory In-Lieu Fee and Bank Information Tracking System, which tracks mitigation (ecological offsetting) in the United States. Hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research – An extremely large and comprehensive database of U.S. public opinion data. A little history: the Roper Center was founded in 1947 by Elmo Burns Roper Jr., an early pioneer in public opinion polling in the U.S., and claims to be “the first social science data archive.” The Roper Center was originally based at Williams College, moved to the University of Connecticut in 1977, and has been housed at Cornell since 2015. Requires an individual or institutional subscription.

Just Interesting Stuff

Racial dot map – [depricated] A simple and compelling way to visualize (a) population density and (b) residential segregation by race in the United States. The map was created by Dustin Cable and is hosted by the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia.