Begun in the 1990s, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is an ongoing international project that examines how peoples' attitudes and behaviors at election time vary across countries with different types of electoral arrangements. This is accomplished by conducting surveys of eligible voters in as many countries as possible, merging the data from all of these sources, and adding contextual information about the socio-economic and institutional characteristics of the country and electoral district in which voters find themselves. This valuable and unique data resource allows researchers to study how characteristics of individuals and characteristics of the environment jointly affect attitudes and behavior. In particular, the study focuses on decisions by eligible voters about whether to vote in an election, how to vote, and why.
The core CSES project involves over 200 scholars from election studies in over 60 countries. Every five years the CSES project designs a new common module of questions to ask in all of the participating election studies. Each participating election study funds and oversees the data collection in its own country. The CSES project provides coordination, scientific guidance, questionnaire design, quality control, and other centralized functions only. This current proposal seeks support to complete the activities of a fourth module of the CSES, and the planning and design of a fifth module.
The CSES project has strong intellectual merit. It is a unique, public resource that advances the understanding of elections and vote choice in ways not possible otherwise. The project helps researchers to better understand: how societal, political, and economic factors shape beliefs and behaviors; how political and social divisions and alignments are formed and transformed; and how citizens, living under diverse political arrangements, evaluate democratic institutions and processes.
The broader impacts of the project are significant. CSES receives, cleans, checks, and merges all of the data collected by the many country teams and makes the information freely and immediately available to the world via the project website at: www.cses.org. The CSES serves as a public resource for researchers, students, policymakers, journalists, governments, and other interested parties. A large and growing number of publications have been based on the project. The output from CSES has policy implications for the design and implementation of electoral systems around the world, as well as significant implications for our understanding of democracy.
CSES has many additional benefits, including the training of students in data use and analysis. CSES is widely used in university courses, and students regularly serve as research assistants for the project. CSES also works to improve the quality of the scientific study of elections generally, in new democracies in particular, by providing collaborative and networking opportunities, and by encouraging and providing guidance to scholars studying elections and democracy worldwide.
