Election studies 

also see: GESIS-ZA election studies page

ICORE election studies

The GESIS-ZA has collected several major election studies on national parliaments in Europe in cooperation with the International Committee for Research into Elections and Representative Democracy (ICORE) and the Council of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).

ICORE was established by the principal investigators from nine European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Elections studies available in these countries have been documented in the "ICORE Inventory of National Election Studies 1945 - 1995". The study descriptions included in this inventory can also be searched through the ISYS full-text retrieval system.

The ICORE holdings at the ZA EUROLAB presently comprises more than 160 election studies with documentation from the above mentioned countries for the time period 1949 until 2002. Please note that most studies can only be accessed in the ZA EUROLAB with prior formal permission. For further information contact ZA EUROLAB staff.

In the meantime several other countries have joined ICORE, among others Portugal. The Portuguese election study 2002 can be ordered via the ZA.

ICORE news homepage: http://acsr.anu.edu.au/newsletters.html

European Voter integrated election files

Based on the ICORE election studies principal investigators from Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have made integrated subsets of the respective national election studies. These subsets have served as bases for the analyses published in Jacques Thomassen (ed.) "The European Voter" due for publication by the Oxford University Press in June 2005. GESIS-ZA staff has developed a database including the integrated files, trends, study descriptions and other relevant documentation. The database (ZA Nr. 3911) is now publicly available via the Internet.

Election studies from Eastern Europe

A major part of the data collection on elections and political attitudes from East European countries are the 40 archived data sets which have been collected by the "Unit on institutions and social change" of the Science Center Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin - WZB) in the framework of the project "Free elections, political parties and the emergence of competitive party systems in Eastern Europe" since 1991, which was financed by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The data is processed, documented and made available to the scientific community in cooperation of WZB and GESIS-ZA (Election studies from Eastern Europe).

European Election Study (EES)

The EES 1994 essentially consists of a survey conducted immediately after the European Parliament election of June 1994 in the framework of Eurobarometer 41.1. A number of pertinent variables from three other Eurobarometer surveys are documented and included in addition. Longitudinal analyses are particularly supported by the fact that 1994 study contents are partially overlapping with those of the European Election Study 1989 (ZA study number 2320). For detailed information see the EES homepage.

Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems (CSES)

The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative programme of cross-national research among election studies conducted in over fifty consolidated and emerging democracies. By coordinating the collection of electoral data across polities, the CSES strives to advance the understanding of enduring and fundamental debates about electoral behaviour in a way not possible through the secondary analysis of existing data. For further information see CSES homepage.

The Central Archive has set up a European FTP mirror site for the CSES data and documentation on ftp://unix1.za.uni-koeln.de/cses/.