Identifying Ideologues: A Global Dataset on Chief Executives, 1945-2020

Whether the ideology of political leaders make a difference for policymaking and social welfare is of fundamental importance to politics. While a vast social-science literature argues that the ideological orientation of governments matters for policymaking, this research has focused on OECD countries and neglected most of the world’s population and countries. This is in part because existing ideology datasets have limited coverage across countries and time and almost exclusively cover the ideological orientation of democratic governments in Europe and the Americas or have coding procedures which limit their use. This paper therefore presents an original dataset covering the ideological orientation of chief executives in 182 countries from 1945 or independence to 2020. The dataset distinguishes between leftist, centrist, rightist, and chief executives with no discernible economic ideology, and thereby vastly expands the scope and refines the measurement of existing datasets. The paper describes the dataset’s contents and coding procedures, compares it to existing datasets, illustrates its uses by demonstrating that researchers’ common assumptions of developing countries as non-ideological or exclusively rightist are incorrect, and probes existing research on the effect of political institutions on policymaking whilst accounting for leaders’ ideologies. The paper thereby outlines a research agenda to study the global effects of governments’ ideologies on policymaking and socioeconomic outcomes.