International Election Studies

The following main data resources are currently made available by GESIS:

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems – CSES

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. The unique design of CSES 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.

European Election Studies - EES

On occasion of European Elections the European Commission's Eurobarometer surveys regularly included questions on voting behaviour and related items, resulting in special data releases on occasion of the 1989 and 1994 elections. Under the direction of the European Election Study Research Group, the co-responsible investigator, all pre- and post-election waves were integrated into comprehensive cumulative data sets and made available through the social science data archives. Starting with the 1999 elections, the European Election Study Research Group continues the European Election studies project as a separate venture. On occasion of the European Elections 2009 a collaborative project has been launched on “Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union” (PIREDEU).

The European Voter

GESIS 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). Based on the ICORE election studies principal investigators from Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have produced integrated subsets of the respective national election studies. GESIS staff has developed the European Voter database including the integrated files, trends, study descriptions and other relevant documentation.

Election Studies from Eastern Europe

The core of Eastern European Election Studies in the archive currently comprises 40 datasets. They were generated in the context of the "Free Elections, Political Parties and the Emergence of Competitive Party Systems in Eastern Europe" project carried out by the WZB Research Unit Institutions and Social Change. Started in 1991 and promoted by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the project investigated the first democratic elections and their development in so far 13 countries.