The Center for Civil Society Research is also heavily invested in producing relevant, large-scale datasets on civil society and elites to foster comparative research on protests, electoral campaigns, and public debates. The Center hosts three large-scale data producing projects.

The PolDEM project, which provides data on protest events, public debates, and election campaigns based on media analysis in 30 countries from 1970 to the present. 

The Manifesto Project, which provides data on parties' policy preferences and positions based on content analysis of election manifestos in over 60 countries from 1945 to the present. The manifestos on which the analyses are based, including the content analysis annotations, are also published in a large corpus of more than 3,000 original and machine-readable documents and nearly 2 million annotated quasi-sentences.

The Center has also been involved in the OPTED project, taking the lead on Work Package 4, which has focused on political texts from political parties and interest groups, and as one of its outputs has created a large inventory of existing text collections from these actors, helping researchers to quickly locate relevant data sources.

The data produced by these projects is freely and openly available to researchers and other actors interested in civil society and political elites. This is rooted in the deeply held belief that science is a collaborative endeavour that depends heavily on data sharing, while at the same time large, comparative data sets covering long time spans and countries can only be produced through collaborative work with long-term perspectives. This is where the Center aims to make an important impact by providing much needed data for civil society research.

PolDem -Data Portal on Political Conflict and Democracy in Europe 

Manifesto Project  

Observatory of Political Texts in European Democracies (OPTED)