Data Resources for Political Science: Events Data

Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED)
https://www.acleddata.com/
ACLED "is a disaggregated conflict collection, analysis and crisis mapping project. ACLED collects the dates, actors, types of violence, locations, and fatalities of all reported political violence and protest events across Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Political violence and protest includes events that occur within civil wars and periods of instability, public protest and regime breakdown."

Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS)
http://www.strausscenter.org/ccaps/
The CCAPS project, which is hosted by the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at UT-Austin, is devoted to the study of the relationship between climate change and international/internal stability on the African continent. The project has produced various data collections such as the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD), which provides event-level data on riots, coups, strikes, and other instances of social unrest, and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED), which provides event-level data on various types of armed conflict.

Cline Center Historical Phoenix Event Data
https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/project/machine-generated-event-data-projects/phoenix-data
The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois has assembled that cover "the period 1945-2015 and includes several million events extracted from 14 million news stories." The data are coded for variable such as the nature and location of the event, the type of government response, and the number of fatalities involved. For post-2015 events data, see the Phoenix Real Time Event Data.

Computational Event Data System
http://eventdata.parusanalytics.com/index.html
The Computational Event Data System "uses automated coding of English-language news reports to generate political event data focusing on the Middle East, Balkans, and West Africa. These data are used in statistical early warning models to predict political change." The project's data collections consist of coded data on individual political events, including incidents of political violence. NOTE - events data files can be very large and often require some proficiency with database applications or statistical software.

National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Data Collections
http://www.start.umd.edu/data-and-tools/start-datasets
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which is funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security, is devoted to " utilizing state-of-the-art theories, methods, and data from the social and behavioral sciences to improve the understanding of the origins, dynamics, and social and psychological impacts of terrorism." As part of its work, it has assembled data collections on topics such as individual terrorist events, the organizational behavior of ethnic groups in the Middle East and North Africa, profiles of individual perpetrators of terrorist events in the United States, public opinion in Muslim-majority countries, and profiles of individual terrorist organizations. START's Global Terrorism Database is an especially commonly-used data source. START's data collections are available via the START Terrorism Archive Dataverse.