This exercise will use a subset of the European Social Survey(ESS) data which should be opened within Stata. The subset can be accessed from the link below:

Suppose that you wished to compare electoral turnout (where 1 = voted, 0 = did not vote) across different countries, in Stata the relevant command would be.

bysort country: tabulate turnout

This will list the percentages who voted and did not vote for each value of the variable 'country'. The first few lines of the output should be as follows.

 ----------------------------------------------------
-> country = AT

    turnout |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |         50       18.38       18.38
          1 |        222       81.62      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        272      100.00

------------------------------------------------------
-> country = BE

    turnout |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |         30       10.91       10.91
          1 |        245       89.09      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        275      100.00

-------------------------------------------------------
-> country = CH

    turnout |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |         77       30.31       30.31
          1 |        177       69.69      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        254      100.00

While direct inspection of the distribution of a micro variable separately for each macro unit may be appropriate with a relatively small number of macro units, it might be tedious and unhelpful with a large number.