When TED talks, does anyone listen? A new dataset on political leadership

The Technocratic and Education Dataset (TED) provides comprehensive new data on the educational and professional backgrounds of the heads of government of all sovereign states between 1946 and 2015. TED details the educational and employment credentials of 1733 unique heads of government, and provides additional information on their demographic backgrounds and military experience. TED comes in leader-level and country-year versions. These data make three major contributions to the study of leadership. First, TED offers a longer time series than most extant data sets on leadership. Second, TED offers data on a broader cross section of countries, facilitating scholarship on a wider variety of countries, including non-OECD ones, which are excluded from many existing datasets on leaders. Third, by offering detailed data on the educational and employment experiences of leaders, TED helps scholars interested in the mechanisms underlying the effects of these experiences generate more rigorous tests of their theories. TED, therefore, represents a major step forward for those interested in leadership. In this article, we introduce TED and use it to show how the pool of international leaders has changed over time. We end with an empirical application of the data in which we use leadership characteristics to predict countries’ sovereign credit ratings. The article concludes with a discussion of other potential applications of these new data.