Welcome to the Political Apologies Database!
The Political Apologies Database is an inventory of political apologies offered by states or state representatives to a collective for human rights violations that happened in the recent or distant past. It can be accessed through our interactive dashboard or by downloading the full dataset. The latest version of the database was released in August 2022. We will continue to update the database on a regular basis.
For more information on individual apologies, please check the Apology Detail page on the interactive dashboard.
See the Terms of Use, the Codebook, or download the full dataset here: Original database / Coded database.
When using the PAC data, please cite:
Schaafsma, J. & Zoodsma, M. (2021). The Political Apology Database. [Date Retrieved], from the Political Apologies across Cultures website: http://www.politicalapologies.com/.
More information on definitions, data collection, data coding, and analysis can be found in Zoodsma, M. & Schaafsma, J. (2021). Examining the ‘Age of Apology’: Insights from the Political Apologies Database. Journal of Peace Research, 1-13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433211024696
We are very grateful to professor Rhoda Howard-Hassmann, Canada Research Chair in International Human Rights 2003-2016 at Wilfrid Laurier University, for providing us full access to the data that she and her team collected for the Political Apologies and Reparations website.
This website and database are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
If you wish to add to the dataset or make any other suggestions, please e-mail j.schaafsma@tilburguniversity.edu or m.a.zoodsma@tilburguniversity.edu.