The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Preliminary Recommendations of the Planning Committee March 10, 1995

The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative program of cross-national research among election studies conducted in forty-seven consolidated and emerging democracies. The goal of this collaboration is to illuminate how the institutions that govern the conduct of elections constrain the beliefs and behaviors of citizens to condition the nature and quality of democratic choice as expressed through popular elections. By coordinating the collection of electoral data across polities, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems strives to advance the understanding of enduring and fundamental debates about electoral behavior in a way not possible through the secondary analysis of existing data. Social scientists from around the world have collaborated to specify the research agenda, the study design, and the micro-and macro-level data that indigenous teams of researchers will collect within each polity.