The Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA): Transitioning to a Sustainable Public Good

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

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary The Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA) is an online repository of detailed data from elections to national legislative lower houses around the world. This proposal is a request for a modest one-year grant to implement the transition of CLEA to a new organizational model. Currently containing results at the electoral district level of 1,494 elections from 129 countries, this archive helps a sizeable community of active scholars and policy practitioners who produce research and findings with important real-world implications. Users of the data work in areas such as formulating better policies, designing institutions, and allocating development assistance. For example, this sort of knowledge is essential to government agencies (both domestic and foreign) when they engage with new and emerging democracies. These users have a stake in the long-term preservation and improvement of the data. The grant enables the PIs to design and install a new structure of governance (with bylaws); develop an appropriate strategic plan for long-term funding; and augment the archive to a point where it is in the best possible shape when the transition occurs, by expanding the contents of the archive with an eye toward maximizing its global and historical coverage. Technical Summary By providing extensive, high-quality sub-national data on election results, CLEA helps increase the breadth and sophistication of political science research, creates opportunities for novel interdisciplinary inquiry, and facilitates the use of cutting-edge spatial analytical tools. The result is better, richer insights with improved validity. CLEA has recently added new products: geo-coded information on constituencies and summary data on parties and elections. During the grant year, the co-PIs will oversee the formatting (in the process making choices about addressing the diversity of electoral systems worldwide), cleaning, and posting of new elections data, with the aim of maximizing the global and temporal coverage of the archive, (2) make strategic decisions about expanding CLEA, including the geocoding of constituency boundaries, (3) establish links with other social scientific infrastructure projects, including cross-national datasets with social, economic, and political variables that could be matched up to CLEA data at the constituency level, and (4) improve the functionality of the website.