Collaborative research project
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.
Aims and content of the study.
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.
Countries in the study.
A frequently updated election study table across all modules can be found on the CSES website.
Data access.
CSES data are available publicly and are free of charge. Data releases are non-proprietary – in other words the data are made available to the public without preferential or advance access to anyone. Data is available in multiple formats including for common statistical packages like STATA, SPSS, SAS and R. The data can be downloaded from the CSES website as well as via the GESIS data catalogue. The GESIS online analysis tool ZACAT can furthermore be used to browse and explore the dataset.
Organizational structure and funding.
The CSES Secretariat.
In conjunction with national election study collaborators, the CSES Secretariat administers the CSES project. It consists of staff from the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany and the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor in the United States. The Secretariat is responsible for compiling the final CSES dataset by harmonizing the single country studies into a cross-national dataset. It is also responsible for collecting the district and macro data, for data documentation, and for ensuring data quality. The Secretariat, furthermore, maintains the CSES website, promotes the project, provides support to the user community, and organizes conferences and project meetings.
The Planning Committee, collaborators and the CSES Plenary.
The CSES research agenda, study design, and questionnaires are developed by an international committee of leading scholars in political science, sociology, and survey methodology. This committee is known as the CSES Planning Committee. At the beginning of each new module, a new Planning Committee is established. Nominations for the Planning Committee come from the user community, with membership of the Committee then being approved by the CSES Plenary Meeting. The Plenary Meeting is made up of national collaborators from each national election study involved in the CSES. Ideas for new modules can be submitted by anyone. More information on the current planning committee, its members, and subcommittee reports, as well as on past Planning Committees can be found on the CSES website. A list of country collaborators who participate in CSES can also be found on the CSES website.
Funding and support.
The work of the CSES Secretariat is funded by the American National Science Foundation, the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies along with in-kind support from participating election studies, additional organizations that sponsor planning meetings and conferences, and the many organizations that fund election studies by CSES collaborators.
Klingemann Prize.
Each year, the CSES awards the GESIS Klingemann Prize for the best CSES scholarship (paper, book, dissertation, or other scholarly work, broadly defined). The award is sponsored by the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and is named in honor of Professor Dr. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, co-founder of the CSES, an internationally renowned political scientist who made significant contributions to cross-national electoral research. Nominated works must make extensive use of CSES and have a publication date in the calendar year prior to the award, either in print or online.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;