The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

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The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) was founded in 1994 and is a collaborative program of cross-national research among national election studies conducted in over fifty consolidated and emerging democracies. The goals of this unique program of research are three fold: illuminate how electoral institutions constrain the beliefs and behaviors of citizens to condition the nature and quality of democratic choice as expressed through popular elections; understand the nature of political and social cleavages and alignments; and shed light on how citizens, living under diverse political arrangements, evaluate democratic institutions and processes. By coordinating the collection of electoral data across polities, CSES strives to advance the understanding of enduring and fundamental debates about electoral behavior in a way not possible through the secondary analysis of existing data. Social scientists from around the world have collaborated to specify the research agenda, the study design, the micro- and macro-level data that indigenous teams of researchers collect within each policy, and the standards and procedures that are used for data collection and management. The data include a common module of questions placed on the national election survey of each affiliate country; a common set of macro-level indicators regarding the nature of the electoral system, parties, candidates, and related matters; and an archive of documents, such as electoral statutes and party platforms and manifestos, that can inform or become part of the data base that researchers use.