Comparative National Elections Project
Principal Investigator: Richard Gunther
Promoting democracy has become a major theme in U.S. diplomacy. How democracies work and elections function, however, remain pressing questions.
The Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP) is a multi-year multi-county examination of how citizens in democracies around the world receive information about policies, parties, candidates, and politics during the course of election campaigns.
The project began in the late 1980s as a series of surveys in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan. It was expanded in 1993 to include eight more countries in South America, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and East Asia, and to include questions about support for democracy in newly emerging or re-established democratic regimes.
CNEP has recently expanded again to include 24 national election surveys in 19 countries. It is now the third-largest international project of its kind. The survey has also been expanded to include questions about the quality of democracy and corruption in the electoral process; the nature and manifestation of identity in multi-cultural societies; and non-Western values that affect democracy or give rise to violent conflict.
Because CNEP collects so much information, its full potential could only be realized through a rigorously analytical and comparative collaboration of project participants. The Mershon Center has made this possible by supporting a series of conferences at the University of Cape Town, South Africa; the Mateus Foundation in Vila Real, Portugal; and the Yunnan Institute of Chinese Culture in Kunming, China. Participants will meet in Trieste, Italy, in July 2007, and will likely meet in Mozambique in 2008.
At the Trieste meeting, participants will discuss data collected in each country to identify and explain cross-national themes and patterns. Research findings will lead to theoretical insights that can serve as the central foci of the project’s next book. Participants will present first drafts of research reports which will later be revised into publishable chapters for the final volume.
So far CNEP has produced more than 100 book chapters and journal articles and six books, including Democracy, Intermediation, and Voting on Four Continents (Oxford University Press, 2007), edited by Gunther, José Ramón Montero, and Hans-Jürgen Puhle.
This book explores the nature and consequences of support for democracy, finding three distinct clusters of attitudes: democratic satisfaction, political disaffection and democratic support.
The authors find that support for democracy depends not on how well the economy is doing, as has commonly been argued, but on the behavior of key political elites during the crucial states of forming a democratic state. The book also analyzes the impact of “values cleavage” on electoral behavior, finding that politics in the United States has become more polarized by values than in any other country analyzed.
For more information about the Comparative National Elections Project, please see the project website at www.cnep.ics.ul.pt
|
