REIGN

​The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance (REIGN) dataset is the most robust leader-month data, capturing national electoral processes and leadership change. REIGN was originally created by Curtis Bell, and for five years was operated by One Earth Future. As of August 2021, REIGN contained over 138,000 unique leader-month observations. The OEF version of the data can be found below.

Key Outputs:

  • Political conditions in every sovereign state are updated monthly. Coverage starts in January 1950
  • Includes information about more than 2,500 individual leaders in 201 different countries
  • Provides new data about election announcements, delays, and outcomes
  • Includes information about current conditions and scheduled future events, making it ideal for event forecasting

The management of the project was transferred to the University of Central Florida in fall 2021, where is directed by Jonathan Powell.

CoupCast is an effort to provide reliable estimates of the risk of coups in the world. Past estimates from CoupCast, available through August 2021, are available in the OEF version of the REIGN dataset (linked below).  

The Data

Data updated through August 2021 are available below. These files represent the state of the project at the time it was discontinued by OEF.


REIGN Dataset 1950-2021
Election List
Leader List
Regime List
Codebook
Technical Notes

How to Cite

Use of the OEF version of the dataset (ending August 2021) should be cited as follows:

Bell, Curtis, Clayton Besaw, Matthew Frank. 2021. The Rulers, Elections, and Irregular Governance (REIGN) Dataset. Broomfield, CO: One Earth Future.