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

在过去的二十年里，民主国家的数量有了显著的增加。选举制度比较研究(CSES)项目特别适合研究这股民主化浪潮。目前的项目寻求支持，以完成社会经济部门第三个模块的活动，并规划和设计第四个模块。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了，它是对比较选举行为的系统的跨国研究。从理论上讲，该项目具有改变比较政治学研究的潜力；它已成为研究跨国舆论和政治行为研究的学者的主要资源之一。在200多名学者的合作下，CSE以其他方式不可能实现的方式，推动了对有关选举选择的持久和根本问题的理解。CSE协调世界各地约60个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。这一独特的研究计划的目标是：阐明社会、政治和经济体制和结构背景，尤其是选举机构，如何塑造公民的信仰和行为，并影响通过普选表达的民主选择的性质和质量；了解政治和社会分歧和结盟的性质；以及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。CSE对学术界和政策制定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，同样是以可比较的形式收集的。CSES设计、接收、合理化、清理、检查和合并所有这些数据，然后通过该项目网站免费立即向世界学术界提供这些数据：http://www.cses.org.这一公共设施是世界各地比较研究人员的资源，这一点反映在利用这些数据的大量出版物中。只有通过CSE实现的那种比较分析，即在不同的机构环境下使用可比较的工具观察可比较的公民样本，才能适当地确定和衡量机构的影响。只有通过真正的比较分析，才能发现不同民主安排的优缺点。民间社会经济委员会的成果对世界各地选举制度的设计和执行以及对民主的规范性研究都有政策影响。

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.