The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a coordinated comparative project that enables the systematic analysis of electoral behavior under globally varying institutional conditions. CSES coordinates the operation of more than 50 indigenous national election studies across the world, thereby ensuring that information about citizens' behavior and attitudes gathered at each site is comparable. Under CSES auspices, information about the institutional arrangements that characterize each participating country is also collected, also in comparable form. CSES designs, receives, rationalizes, cleans, and merges these data, and then makes them freely and immediately available to the world's scholarly community. CSES is a uniquely valuable resource for comparative research. Already CSES data have been put to productive use - enabling the understanding of the consequences of political institutions for democratic citizens and providing a venue for the further development of comparative methodology - and much more work is underway. Established in 1996, CSES completed its first round of data collection (Module 1) in 2001, with some 33 countries participating. Module 2, with more than 50 participating countries, will draw to a close in 2005. The first two waves of the CSES concentrated on the performance of democracy and on accountability and representation, respectively. The third wave of CSES, commencing in 2006, will focus on the choice set that voters face in an election. While we know a lot about why and how voters vote, we know little about how voting is affected by the kind of choices that are available to the electorate. This issue has broad relevance for both normative and theoretical reasons. This award is to cover only the essential central coordinating operation that CSES has provided so successfully so far, modestly supplemented by funds to provide airfare support to CSES planning meetings for participants from poorer counties in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. All of the costs of the surveys themselves are contributed by the various national studies. The planning for the modules is subsidized by committee members when they host planning committee meetings at least once annually; hosts provide meeting space, plus lodging and meals for all participants.
Broader Impacts. CSES serves as a multiplier of research on comparative politics. CSES makes it possible to generate millions of dollars worth of valuable cross-national data on electoral behavior at a fractional cost. By effectively coordinating the efforts of election specialists and centers around the world, CSES provides a unique resource for scholars everywhere interested in deep and consequential questions of democratic politics. In addition, because CSES is a cooperative effort among projects rather than individuals, there are important consequences for the individual projects involved, in terms of reexamining their own practices and learning from others, and these consequences are especially significant because of the large number of scholars affected by these institutionalized practices. Finally, because some of CSES affiliates, especially those in the emerging democracies, are very new, CSES provides a venue for training social scientists in these emerging democracies in cutting-edge social science theory and methodology.
