A new dataset has come to my attention. The ParlGov dataset, which has been drawn up by Holger Döring and Philip Manow at the University of Bremen, is a really nice resource for people studying contemporary governments, including many of those in semi-presidential countries.

There is coverage of 37 countries, most of which are in Europe. The SP countries covered are: Austria, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine (though there is very little information on Ukraine).

Taking Lithuania as an example, there is a list of all election results since 1990. There is also a list of all governments, listing the party composition (though not the percentage of ministers for each party). There are also links to external sources about the PM and the government. These usually just link to basic Wikipedia pages. However, in some cases they link to the full list of ministers with their party affiliation – Austria is a nice case going right back to 1945. Finally, there is information on individual political parties, including their ideological position on the left/right scale.

The data can be downloaded as a .csv file.