Afrobarometer Surveys

Afrobarometer is a collection of surveys on African citizens' attitudes to democracy, markets, and civil society.

Data is downloadable from the Survey website.

See this webpage for its coverage of countries and years.

For types of questions asked, see here. Data on informal insurance (in a crude way, though) is available.

As a nationally representative sample of the voting age population is interviewed (see here), the surveys can also be used for sub-national demographic statistics such as education level, ethnicity, etc.

For studies using this survey data for analyzing ethnicity and politics, see Miguel and Posner (2006) and Norris and Mattes (2003). Nunn and Wantchekon (2010) use this data to test whether ethnic groups that exported slaves more in the past trust other people less.