<p>Stackexchange/Stackoverflow provides archives of the database as well as a page that allows to write and execute SQL scripts that access the latest database dump. The webpage for the latter is data.stackexchange.com</p>
<p>An example of extracting information about votes is in this q&amp;a: <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5336/">https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/a/5336/</a></p>
<p>It links to a script like <a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872670/scores-for-questions-and-answers-compared-by-month#graphhttp://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/872670/scores-for-questions-and-answers-compared-by-month#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> which creates images such as this:</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJf8d.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/dJf8d.png" alt="example" /></a></p>
<p>This graph shows that among the new posts the answers receive relatively more votes than the questions.</p>
<p>This can be due to a mixture of causes. Potentially the users have changed in their voting behaviour, but it may also have to do with the age of the questions and newer questions are also less old. Relating to age: it is possible that questions receive less votes early and more later. Also, among  questions there might be more low quality posts that get removed in time, that is in particular visible in the gap at the end of the curve where questions that are less than 1 year old have on average a much lower score (among questions older than 1 year the bad, low score, questions are removed, this happens automatically after 1 year).</p>
<p>It is also possible to analyse the votes based on a specific time period, like the number of votes received in the first X days. In that way the age of the questions has no influence as the votes are all recorded for the same age of X days. Below is an example for 30 days.</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1uZxa.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/1uZxa.png" alt="old posts with high scores" /></a></p>
<p>That image above is from this meta post <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/338680/">Is the voting and reputation system sustainable? How can we improve it or maybe it should be replaced?</a> which includes several more ways of analysing the distribution in votes.</p>
<p>An intriguing example is the distribution of the mean of votes for answers as function of the time of the day that the answer and the corresponding question had been posted. (the effect is so strong in the image because it relates to the statistics for a language related StackExchange which makes it more strongly tied to a particular location/longitude on Earth)</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9qn2.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9qn2.png" alt="the impact of question and answer posting time on answer score" /></a></p>
