Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative program of research among election study teams from around the world. Participating countries include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies. The resulting data are deposited along with voting, socio-demographic, district and macro variables. Since 2009, GESIS has joined forces with the CSES secretariat to contribute to the production of high quality, free of charge, public datasets.

The CSES is composed of three tightly linked parts: First, a common module of public opinion survey questions is included in each participant country's post-election study. These "micro" level data include vote choice, candidate and party evaluations, current and retrospective economic evaluations, evaluation of the electoral system itself, in addition to standardized sociodemographic measures. Second, district level data are reported for each respondent, including electoral returns, turnout, and the number of candidates. Finally, system or "macro" level data report aggregate electoral returns, electoral rules and formulas, and regime characteristics. This design allows researchers to conduct cross-level, as well as cross-national analyses, addressing the effects of electoral institutions on citizens' attitudes and behavior, the presence and nature of social and political cleavages, and the evaluation of democratic institutions across different political regimes.

The research agenda, questionnaires, and study design are developed by an international committee of leading scholars of electoral politics and political science. The design is implemented in each country by their foremost social scientists.

The primary purpose of the CSES secretariat is to process the national data and to document all country specific issues in a single cross-national codebook. The newly established cooperation with GESIS aims to provide data access to a larger research community and to integrate CSES into GESIS’ retrieval systems and analysis tools.

For further questions and information about CSES you are welcome to contact the CSES Secretariat.

The modules:

Module 1 (1996-2001) Performance of the System - focuses on three general themes: the impact of electoral institutions on citizens' political cognition and behavior; the nature of political and social cleavages and alignments; and the evaluation of democratic institution and processes.

Module 2 (2002-2006) Representation and Accountability - addresses the contrast between the view that elections are a mechanism to hold government accountable and the view that they are a means to ensure that citizens' views and interests are properly represented in the democratic process.

Module 3 (2006-2011) Meaningful Choices –investigates the meaningfulness of electoral choices. Accordingly, it focuses on a major aspect of electoral research: the contingency in choice of available options.

Module 4 is under preparation by the planning committee since 2009. Data collection started in 2011, and will cover another five year period.

Data access and e-mail list

The free, integrated dataset, codebooks and further documents are available here. The data is accessible as a text file and can be imported into common statistical software packages via prepared syntax files.

Furthermore, to get access to the CSES e-mail list, you can register here.