The Political Leaders’ Affiliation Database (PLAD)

The Political Leaders’ Affiliation Database (PLAD) contains information on the birthplaces and ethnicities of the effective leaders of 177 countries around the world in the 1989-2023 period. The dataset is at the political leader level and reports information on 1,171 effective leaders, in office for 1,334 distinct periods of time. Birthplaces of the effective leader are geo-coded, with highest precision being the village or city level. Ethnicity is linked to the GeoEPR database (Vogt et al. 2015).