About the Comparative Study of Election Surveys (CSES)

Overview & Mission

The Comparative Study of Election Surveys (CSES) is a collaborative program of research among election study teams around the world. Participating countries and polities include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies. The resulting data are merged with voting, demographic, district, and macro-level variables into one comprehensive, comparative dataset for open scientific analysis.

Established in 1994 by an international group of election researchers meeting in Berlin, Germany, CSES advances three core scientific goals:

Comparative Perspective: Establish whether political behavior is universal across democratic systems or contingent upon institutional configurations and social cleavages.
Contextual Analysis: Systematically link micro-level individual survey responses with macro-level political and institutional characteristics (e.g. electoral systems, party competition, federalism, executive-legislative relations).
Open Access Infrastructure: Provide fully harmonized, free, and publicly accessible data to the global research community without paywalls or commercial restrictions.

How CSES Operates

CSES is a bottom-up, collaborative project governed by democratic academic principles:

Module Design by Planning Committee: Every five years, a new Planning Committee is elected by participating election study teams to develop a new module theme, question batteries, and macro variables.
Collaborator Administration: National election study teams translate and administer the CSES common module as part of their national post-election survey.
Secretariat Data Harmonization: The CSES Secretariat—jointly administered by the Center for Global Democracy (CGD) at Vanderbilt University in the United States and GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany—cleans, standardizes, documents, and releases the final cross-national datasets.

Research Themes Across Survey Modules

Over its three-decade history, CSES has released six major survey modules, with Module 7 currently in preparation:

Module	Active Years	Core Scientific Focus
Module 7	2026–2031	In Preparation: Developing new thematic modules on contemporary electoral democracy.
Module 6	2021–2026	Representative Democracy to the Test: Democratic backsliding, polarization, electoral integrity, and institutional trust.
Module 5	2016–2021	Democracy Divided: Populist attitudes, anti-establishment sentiment, and citizen-elite ideological congruency.
Module 4	2011–2016	Distributional Politics: Social protection, economic inequality, public spending, and mobilization.
Module 3	2006–2011	Meaningful Choices: Perceived distinctiveness of political alternatives and democratic performance.
Module 2	2001–2006	Accountability & Representation: Electoral institutions, citizen perceptions of responsiveness, and governance clarity.
Module 1	1996–2001	Impact of Electoral Institutions: Social cleavages, alignments, and institutional effects on participation.
IMD	1996–2016	Integrated Module Dataset: Longitudinally harmonized dataset spanning 55 polities and 174 election studies.

Governance & Institutional Partners

The CSES project is supported and administered under institutional cooperation agreements with:

Center for Global Democracy (CGD), Vanderbilt University (Nashville, USA) — U.S. Institutional Home of the Secretariat
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Cologne & Mannheim, Germany) — European Hub of the Secretariat
Collaborating National Election Studies across Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East.