PPD: Public Political Discontent
The Public Political Discontent (PPD) Database
Public discontent with the political system is a fundamental political phenomenon, long seen as shaping the stability of regimes of every kind and as a threat to democratic governance in particular. Yet the most basic facts about it remain unsettled: how deep it runs, whether it is rising or merely fluctuating, where it is most and least pronounced, and what causes it and follows from it. The reason is data: no single survey question on political discontent has been asked consistently and comparably across all countries and years, so researchers relying on different items have reached conflicting conclusions.
The goal of the Public Political Discontent (PPD) dataset is to overcome this problem. The PPD dataset combines a comprehensive collection of survey data—388 survey datasets and 111 distinct survey items—with a state-of-the-art latent-variable model to provide annual time-series estimates of political discontent that are comparable across space and time for 136 countries and regions over as many as 56 years (1968–2023). It is the largest and most temporally and spatially comprehensive dataset on the topic to date.
The PPD’s coverage extends to non-democracies and thinly surveyed countries, and even among the most data-rich countries it offers more than twice as many country-years as the best single survey item. Every estimate comes with quantified measurement uncertainty that can be carried directly into statistical analyses. We anticipate that the PPD data will become a crucial source for cross-national and longitudinal research on political trust, populism, democratic backsliding, and regime stability across regime types.
A full description of the PPD dataset, the source data used to generate it, and validations of its estimates is presented here:
Ma, Haofeng, Jeongho Choi, Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Yue Hu, and Frederick Solt. 2026. “Macrodiscontent Across Countries.” European Political Science Review 1-17.
To use PPD scores in full descriptive and statistical analyses, the complete dataset, formatted for use in R, is available for download through the button below. For a first look, the web app on this page lets you explore the estimates: choose up to four countries and compare their estimated levels and trends of public political discontent, with their uncertainty, over time.
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Please cite the PPD as follows:
Ma, Haofeng, Jeongho Choi, Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Yue Hu, and Frederick Solt. 2026. Macrodiscontent Across Countries. European Political Science Review, 1-17. doi:10.1017/S1755773926100599.