Democratic Design: The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Project

By W. Phillips Shively

The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaboration of about fifty national election studies from around the world. The project creates a dataset of individuals from countries with varying political institutions, answering a common set of political questions. Participating countries collect a common dataset comprising both a nationally representative postelection survey module and a module of system-level institutional data designed to answer questions about how political institutions affect citizens’ political behavior and their perspectives on democracy. Given the wide variation among these countries with regard to electoral rules, presidential or parliamentary government, systems of federalism or central control, and lines of political conflict, among other things, our combination of institutional and mass-level survey data provides the first really good opportunity to examine a number of classic, critical questions about democratic design.

Here are a few examples of specific avenues of inquiry that guided the original development of the project, forming the core of research that is now beginning:

• Does satisfaction with democracy vary with the degree to which power is located in the regions, as compared with the capital? And does this relationship depend on the structure of social divisions in the country?

• Do voters vote more strategically under some electoral systems than others?

• Are voters more likely to judge the government on the basis of the economy’s performance in a presidential system (where responsibility focuses on a single individual) than in a parliamentary system based on coalitions?

Each national study agrees to donate approximately fifteen minutes out of a national postelection survey, and drop into this segment a module designed by the CSES planning committee, an international committee of scholars involved in election surveys. The end result is a dataset of perhaps seventy or eighty thousand respondents, drawn from a number of countries, that includes a set of commonly coded demographic background variables, the module of survey questions, and a detailed mass of information about each country’s democratic institutions.

Actually, the term “electoral studies” in the title of the project is a bit of a misnomer. The project was originally conceived to allow investigation of how citizens respond in their voting behavior to variations in electoral systems, but it has broadened also to include variation in other institutions, such as federalism and presidential or parliamentary democracy. And in practice, of course, once the survey data have been gathered across a set of countries, investigators can insert into the dataset as contextual variables anything that varies across the countries—economic performance, cultural variables, ethnic or religious mixes of populations, and so on.

CSES was initially fostered by the International Committee for Research into Elections and Representative Democracy. The first survey module went into the field in 1996, and ran for the period 1996 through 2001; a window this large was required in order to accommodate the varying schedules of national elections across so many countries. A second module is now in the field and will be completed in 2006. Planning is nearing completion for a third module to run from 2007 through 2012.

Every survey module covers certain basic political attitudes and perceptions such as party identification, a left-right placement of each major political party, and satisfaction with the workings of democracy; these are repeated in each.

In addition, each module addresses some particular theoretical question. The first module addressed especially questions of strategic voting behavior; the second focused on the distinction between majoritarian and consensus-based democratic institutions; and the third will feature the nature of the political choices offered to individuals, and how those choices affect individual decisions.

The CSES datasets are publicly available, with no embargo, on the project website. A list of all collaborators is also available there, as is the membership of the current planning committee, contact information, and other information about the project. The project bibliography, available on the site, shows a considerable body of work published already from what is still a young project.