Data

Recognizing that nation-building policies often vary substantially within the same country, the NBP Dataset records state policies directed at socially and politically relevant ethnic groups. It tracks these policies annually for more than 1,300 groups in 163 countries from 1945 to 2020. Unless specified otherwise, the dataset is organized at the group-country-year level. The coding is de jure and captures policy adoption rather than implementation. Group selection builds on earlier work and consolidates the group lists used in the group-based Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) and All Minorities at Risk (AMAR) datasets.

The NBP Dataset systematically codes state policies across five domains:

• Mass Education: Language education policies, religious instruction, school segregation laws, and affirmative action policies.
• Laws regulating public identity expression: Bans and restrictions on naming practices and the use of language in public life and mass media; restrictions on religious symbols, places of worship, and publications.
• Citizenship: Exclusion from and access to citizenship.
• Constitutional provisions: Group mentionings (positively/neutral or negatively), official language(s) and religion(s), secularism, and freedom of religious practice (the latter two at the country–year level).
• Eliminationist policies: State-sponsored killings; forced relocation; state-created ghettos, reservations; resocialization camps, forced child removal, destruction of cultural heritage sites or artifacts, and forced changes to a group’s way of life.

In addition, the NBP Dataset includes key group characteristics, such as whether a group is spatially concentrated, indigenous, racialized, the country’s core group, and whether it has a self-determination movement.

Visualize the Data

Here you will find visualizations of some of our main findings: global, country-level, and regional nation-building trends over time. We distinguish four major types:

• Accommodation policies legally recognize and institutionalize group-based cultural differences.
• Assimilation policies promote the adoption of a dominant or overarching national identity.
• Segregation policies socially and/or physically separate groups from the body politic.
• Eradication policies actively erase group identities, either through the physical removal or through forced cultural homogenization.

Using composite indices that each combine different state policies from the NBP Dataset—and apply theory-driven weights—we measure the extent to which states accommodate, assimilate, segregate, or eradicate a particular group. To produce country-level index scores, we weight groups by their share of the country’s minority population. For more details on our empirical strategy, see vom Hau et al. (2025) in the Publications section.

Access the NBP Dataset

You can access the NBP dataset here.