The Dynamics of Political Choice: the Third Module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES)

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

There has been a significant increase in the number of democratic nations over the last two decades. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project is especially well-positioned to study this wave of democratization. The current project seeks support to complete the activities of the third module of the CSES, and to plan and design the fourth module. The project encompasses the coordination and leadership of the social science research efforts of approximately 60 nations. Now over ten years old, the CSES is a systematic cross-national study of comparative electoral behavior. Theoretically informed, the project has the potential to transform the study of comparative politics; it has become accepted as one of the principal resources for scholars investigating cross-national public-opinion and political-behavioral research. Involving the collaboration of more than 200 scholars, CSES advances the understanding of enduring and fundamental questions about electoral choice in ways not otherwise possible. CSES coordinates the operation of approximately 60 national election studies across the world, thereby ensuring that information about citizens' behavior and attitudes gathered at each site is comparable. The goals of this unique research program are: to illuminate how societal, political, and economic institutional and structural contexts, most especially electoral institutions, shape the beliefs and behaviors of citizens and condition the nature and quality of democratic choice as expressed through popular elections; to understand the nature of political and social divisions and alignments; and to shed light on how citizens living under diverse political arrangements evaluate democratic institutions and processes. The CSES has broader impacts for both the academic and policymaking community. In addition to the survey data, information about the institutional arrangements and other social-, political-, and economic-contextual conditions that characterize each participating country are also collected, again in comparable form. CSES designs, receives, rationalizes, cleans and checks, and merges all of these data, and then makes them freely and immediately available to the world's scholarly community via the project website at: http://www.cses.org. This public-use facility is a resource for comparative researchers worldwide, and that is reflected in the large and growing number of publications that utilize the data. Only through the kind of comparative analysis that CSES makes possible, where comparable samples of citizens are observed with comparable instruments under different institutional settings, can the impact of institutions be properly ascertained and measured. And only through genuinely comparative analysis can the merits and shortcomings of different democratic arrangements be discovered. The output from the CSES has policy implications for the design and implementation of electoral systems around the world, as well as implications for the normative study of democracy.