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Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative research project among national election studies around the world. Participating countries and polities include a common module of survey questions in their national post-election studies. The resulting data are collated together along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables into one dataset allowing comparative analysis of voting behavior from a multilevel perspective.
The CSES is published as a free, public dataset. The project is administered by the CSES Secretariat, a joint effort between the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany.
The CSES project was founded in 1994 with two major aims. The first was to promote international collaboration between national election studies. The second was to allow researchers to study variations in political institutions, especially electoral systems, and their effects on individual attitudes and behaviors, especially turnout and vote choice.
CSES datasets contain variables at three levels. The first is micro-level variables which are answered by respondents during post-election surveys in each included country. The second is district-level variables that contain election results from the electoral districts that survey respondents are situated in. The third is macro-level variables containing information about the country context and electoral system, as well as aggregate data such as economic indicators and democracy indices. This nested data structure, as depicted in Figure 1, allows for multilevel analysis.
A new thematic module is devised by the CSES Planning Committee every five years. Between the final releases of the complete modules, CSES also disseminates advance releases of datasets periodically, which include partial data for modules that have not been fully released yet.
A complete table of all variables available across modules can be found on the CSES website.
CSES also has an Integrated Module Dataset (IMD) which brings together the existing Standalone CSES Modules (CSES Modules 1–5 inclusive) into one longitudinal and harmonized dataset. Variables that appear in at least three Standalone CSES Modules, up to and including CSES Module 5, are eligible for inclusion in IMD, with all polities participating in CSES included in the dataset.
CSES IMD includes over 395,000 individual-level observations across 230 elections in 59 polities, with voter evaluations of over 800 political parties. Highlights of the IMD file are party and coalition numerical codes synchronized across CSES Modules and the incorporation of data bridging variables allowing CSES data to be easily merged with other common datasets in the social sciences. CSES IMD launched in December 2018 and is being rolled out on a phased basis with the latest release, Phase 4 released in February 2024.
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Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative research project among national election studies around the world. Participating countries and polities include a common module of survey questions in their national post-election studies. The resulting data are collated together along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables into one dataset allowing comparative analysis of voting behavior from a multilevel perspective.
The CSES is published as a free, public dataset. The project is administered by the CSES Secretariat, a joint effort between the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany.
The CSES project was founded in 1994 with two major aims. The first was to promote international collaboration between national election studies. The second was to allow researchers to study variations in political institutions, especially electoral systems, and their effects on individual attitudes and behaviors, especially turnout and vote choice.
CSES datasets contain variables at three levels. The first is micro-level variables which are answered by respondents during post-election surveys in each included country. The second is district-level variables that contain election results from the electoral districts that survey respondents are situated in. The third is macro-level variables containing information about the country context and electoral system, as well as aggregate data such as economic indicators and democracy indices. This nested data structure, as depicted in Figure 1, allows for multilevel analysis.
A new thematic module is devised by the CSES Planning Committee every five years. Between the final releases of the complete modules, CSES also disseminates advance releases of datasets periodically, which include partial data for modules that have not been fully released yet.
A complete table of all variables available across modules can be found on the CSES website.
CSES also has an Integrated Module Dataset (IMD) which brings together the existing Standalone CSES Modules (CSES Modules 1–5 inclusive) into one longitudinal and harmonized dataset. Variables that appear in at least three Standalone CSES Modules, up to and including CSES Module 5, are eligible for inclusion in IMD, with all polities participating in CSES included in the dataset.
CSES IMD includes over 395,000 individual-level observations across 230 elections in 59 polities, with voter evaluations of over 800 political parties. Highlights of the IMD file are party and coalition numerical codes synchronized across CSES Modules and the incorporation of data bridging variables allowing CSES data to be easily merged with other common datasets in the social sciences. CSES IMD launched in December 2018 and is being rolled out on a phased basis with the latest release, Phase 4 released in February 2024.