The Dynamics of Political Choice: the Third Module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)

在过去二十年中，民主国家的数量显著增加。 选举制度比较研究（CSES）项目特别适合研究这一民主化浪潮。 目前的项目寻求支持，以完成CSES第三单元的活动，并规划和设计第四单元。 该项目包括协调和领导大约60个国家的社会科学研究工作。CSES已经有十多年的历史，是一个系统的跨国比较选举行为研究。 从理论上讲，该项目有可能改变比较政治学的研究;它已被接受为学者调查跨国舆论和政治行为研究的主要资源之一。 涉及200多名学者的合作，CSES推进了对选举选择的方式，否则不可能持久和根本问题的理解。 CSES协调全世界约60项国家选举研究的运作，从而确保在每个地点收集的关于公民行为和态度的信息具有可比性。 这个独特的研究计划的目标是：照亮如何社会，政治和经济体制和结构的背景下，最特别是选举机构，塑造公民的信仰和行为和条件的性质和民主选择的质量，通过普选表达;了解政治和社会分工和结盟的性质;并阐明生活在不同政治安排下的公民如何评价民主制度和进程。CSES对学术界和决策界都有更广泛的影响。 除了调查数据外，还收集了关于每个参与国的体制安排和其他社会、政治和经济背景条件的信息，同样是以可比形式收集的。 CSES设计，接收，合理化，清理和检查，并合并所有这些数据，然后通过项目网站www.example.com免费立即提供给世界学术界http://www.cses.org。这反映在大量且不断增长的利用这些数据的出版物上。只有通过CSES进行的那种比较分析，如果在不同的体制环境下用可比的工具对可比的公民样本进行观察，就有可能适当地确定和衡量体制的影响。 只有通过真正的比较分析，才能发现不同民主安排的优点和缺点。 CSES的产出对世界各地选举制度的设计和实施具有政策意义，对民主的规范性研究也有影响。

There has been a significant increase in the number of democratic nations over the last two decades. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project is especially well-positioned to study this wave of democratization. The current project seeks support to complete the activities of the third module of the CSES, and to plan and design the fourth module. The project encompasses the coordination and leadership of the social science research efforts of approximately 60 nations.Now over ten years old, the CSES is a systematic cross-national study of comparative electoral behavior. Theoretically informed, the project has the potential to transform the study of comparative politics; it has become accepted as one of the principal resources for scholars investigating cross-national public-opinion and political-behavioral research. Involving the collaboration of more than 200 scholars, CSES advances the understanding of enduring and fundamental questions about electoral choice in ways not otherwise possible. CSES coordinates the operation of approximately 60 national election studies across the world, thereby ensuring that information about citizens' behavior and attitudes gathered at each site is comparable. The goals of this unique research program are: to illuminate how societal, political, and economic institutional and structural contexts, most especially electoral institutions, shape the beliefs and behaviors of citizens and condition the nature and quality of democratic choice as expressed through popular elections; to understand the nature of political and social divisions and alignments; and to shed light on how citizens living under diverse political arrangements evaluate democratic institutions and processes.The CSES has broader impacts for both the academic and policymaking community. In addition to the survey data, information about the institutional arrangements and other social-, political-, and economic-contextual conditions that characterize each participating country are also collected, again in comparable form. CSES designs, receives, rationalizes, cleans and checks, and merges all of these data, and then makes them freely and immediately available to the world's scholarly community via the project website at: http://www.cses.org. This public-use facility is a resource for comparative researchers worldwide, and that is reflected in the large and growing number of publications that utilize the data.Only through the kind of comparative analysis that CSES makes possible, where comparable samples of citizens are observed with comparable instruments under different institutional settings, can the impact of institutions be properly ascertained and measured. And only through genuinely comparative analysis can the merits and shortcomings of different democratic arrangements be discovered. The output from the CSES has policy implications for the design and implementation of electoral systems around the world, as well as implications for the normative study of democracy.