This R package contains Party/Identity-Language, Ethnicity and Religion (PILER) database, along with the code to build the database.
The database contains a calculation of the degree of division in the country, based on patterns of how different groups support political parties. This calculation is based on data drawn from a number of publicly available cross-national surveys.
The code is designed to make it straightforward to extend coverage in the database by adding new surveys.
For more details, see:
Fraenkel, J., & Crawley, S. (2025). Does Ethnic Fractionalization Lead to Polarization? Introducing a new Dataset on Communal Party Affiliations. Ethnopolitics, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2025.2516905
There are two methods that can be used to access the PILER data: (1) via Excel spreadsheets, (2) via the R data structure that ships with the package.
The Excel spreadsheets for the latest release can be found on the GitHub Releases page.
To access the R data structure, install and load the package (see below). The data will be loaded as the 'piler' object. See the gen.piler.db() documentation for details on the structure of the piler object.
library(remotes)
install_github("sam-crawley/PilerDB")
library(PilerDB)
To view the PILER DB via the Shiny web interface, install this package, and run:
PilerDB::launchPilerDash()