Political Leaders Through Time (PLT)

Studies that seek to understand political leadership, stability and conflict focus primarily on the last 100-years as the basis of their evidence. This project collects data on leaders in over 2000 polities throughout the world over two millenia to examine how geography conditions political stability. The project has broader impact by producing scholarship that advances our understanding of the social and political factors that are associated with political stability and other features of a peaceful society.

In addition, it provides data that is useful shedding new light on a wide variety of other important questions: When did political institutions in the West diverge from those in the East? When were women chosen as leaders? Was the tenure of leaders in the ancient world shorter, longer, or comparable to the tenure of leaders today?

Have instances of violent removal of leaders changed appreciably over time? How has the advent of mass democracy affected the circulation of elites? How do geographical features of polities influence these patterns?

Social-science studies of political leaders focus mostly on the contemporary era. “Political Leaders through Time” (PLT) encompasses two millennia, over 2,000 polities, nearly 5,000 polity-centuries, and more than 70,000 leaders, each of which is coded across twenty-four attributes. The substantive focus of the PLT centers on the question of political order.

It is hypothesized that political stability may be conditioned by geographic features. Additionally, the project provides a first-of-its-kind gazetteer of historical states complemented by GIS polygons to map their locations through time. The PLT allows for a systematic and global analysis of many other questions that have heretofore been examined only in the modern era or for a single region (e.g., Europe).

As such, the PLT offers a massive expansion of our knowledge about leaders and leadership transitions through time and across the world.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.