The University of Gothenburg hosts the consortium which also includes Stockholm-, Uppsala-, and Umeå universities. Together the consortium partners are building a world-leading hub for contextual data with user-friendly access to data, documentation, and online visualization tools.

Demscore facilitates large-scale comparative analyses on the grand challenges of today’s societies, including those caused by population aging, rapidly changing migration patterns, increased social inequalities, accelerating globalization, recurrent financial crises, political deadlocks, violent conflict, and the rise of populism. The interdisciplinary nature of Demscore data is essential to advance adequate policy responses to such complex, and interrelated societal challenges facing Sweden, Europe, and the world today.

The joint Demscore infrastructure ensures that data integrity and quality is at the highest international standards, and it maximizes usability in the measurement of contextual data with over 20,000+ variables across nearly all countries in the world, from 1789 to the present. It creates critical time- and cost saving advantages in data collection, management, distribution, and not the least for end-users in the scientific community. A fully normalized, joint PostgreSQL database, sophisticated programming, and a web-based interface will make it possible to select a series of variables across all six Demscore databases, and get a custom-designed dataset and codebook generated automatically. In addition, online analysis and visualization tools will be available alongside detailed documentation on methodologies and data curation.

Demscore is funded by the Swedish Research Council, University of Gothenburg, Stockholm University, Uppsala University and Umeå University