The Seventh Module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)

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The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is composed of researchers from more than 60 countries with the shared goal of investigating critical questions around elections, turnout, and voting in the United States and worldwide. Each participating researcher raises their own funding and uses agreed-upon, high-quality scientific methods to select and interview a representative set of persons from each country. The interview includes a questionnaire designed by the CSES and changed every five years to address a new set of important issues. The resulting interviews are combined into a single data resource with information about their countries and electoral systems which CSES distributes on its website at no cost. The ability to compare across countries helps scientists, students, policymakers, and the public better understand how people feel and behave around elections and voting, to what extent the country they find themselves within influences them, and how and why elections proceed differently across the world.The project has two broad goals: to complete in-progress Module 6, which is designed to support new discoveries regarding citizens’ roles in representative democracy under stress, and to design Module 7. CSES Module 6 provides data from 50+ countries to advance discoveries on questions regarding how citizens view the functioning of their democratic political systems, and with what consequences for electoral attitudes and behavior. To complete Module 6, the project will continue to audit, clean, and harmonize newly-contributed election study datasets from around the world and disseminate individual and comparative (cross-national) datasets that contain both micro (individual) and macro (district, country, administrative) data. To design Module 7, CSES will constitute a new international planning committee that will crowd-source proposals from leading scholars around the world and determine the thematic focus of that module. In addition to these core activities, the project features a new “data playground” to disseminate awareness of and access to CSES datasets; supports and expands the project’s network of international and US collaborators; and continues to set new standards for the scientific methods for the comparative study of elections, disseminating awareness of these via white papers, conferences, and other engagements.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.