  By considering all asteroid linear polarization data available in the
literature, it is possible to obtain updated phase - polarization curves for
several tens of objects. In a separate paper (Cellino et al., 2015a, MNRAS,
451, 3473) we have produced new calibrations of different relations between the
geometric albedo and several polarimetric parameters, based on an analysis of a
limited sample of asteroids for which the albedo is known with sufficient
accuracy. In this paper, we present the main polarization parameters and
corresponding albedos for a larger dataset of asteroids which we did not use
for calibration purposes. We find a good agreement between the albedo values
computed using different polarization parameters. Conversely, in the case of
the so-called Barbarian asteroids the situation is rather unclear. Moreover, we
present an updated analysis of the distributions of different polarimetric
parameters, including the so-called inversion angle and the solar phase angle
corresponding to the extreme value of negative polarization, and study their
mutual relations. We find that the above parameters can be used to clearly
distinguish some unusual classes of asteroids. Polarimetric parameters are
known to be related to physical properties of asteroid surfaces which are
difficult to infer by means of other observing techniques. By using a much
larger dataset, in our analysis we confirm and extend some results obtained in
the past by other authors, and we explore more systematically some features
that had been mostly unexplored before, mainly concerning the morphology of the
negative polarization branch.
