The Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to congratulate visiting scholar Miriam Golden on receiving the 2025 Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Best Dataset Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Politics section. The Data Set Award recognizes a publicly available data set that has made an important contribution to the field of comparative politics.

Golden and her co-researchers, Nick Carnes (Duke University), Noam Lupu (Vanderbilt University), and Eugenia Nazrullaeva (University of Konstanz), were honored for their Global Legislator Database — a cross-national dataset on the characteristics of 19,704 national parliamentarians in 97 of the world's 103 electoral democracies.

The database includes individual legislator-level information on those who held office in each country's lower (or unicameral) chamber during a single legislative session as of 2015, 2016, or 2017. Variables included for each legislator are name, date of birth, gender, party affiliation, last occupation prior to holding elected office, and highest level of education completed. An article describing and validating the dataset was published in The British Journal of Political Science in February 2025.

The award committee shared the following on their selection:

The committee was deeply impressed by the depth and breadth of the dataset and acknowledged the tremendous contribution it makes to the field of comparative politics. While basic descriptive data on legislator characteristics has been available for a handful of, mostly Western, democracies, the Global Legislator Dataset excels in its truly global coverage and its inclusion of hard-to-find information related to the social background of legislators. The dataset is sure to become a standard reference in comparative politics. The authors have produced an invaluable common good to the benefit of the comparative politics community. The committee is excited about the range of new comparative representation research the dataset enables.

Golden, who has been a visiting scholar at CDDRL since 2024, researches political economy, and she has conducted field research on issues of corruption and political malfeasance in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Her work has previously been honored with the Jewell-Loewenberg Prize, the Lawrence Longley Award, the Gregory A. Leubbert Book Award (runner-up), a Choice Award, and the Gabriel A. Almond Award for the best dissertation in comparative politics. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), and the International Growth Centre (IGC). She is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally entitled Capacity Gap: Electoral Failure in Weak States and is co-author, with economist Raymond Fisman, of Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2017).

With the Global Legislator Database already shaping new research on representation, Golden’s recognition underscores the importance of building accessible tools that expand knowledge and open new directions for the study of democracy.