Comparative National Elections Project

Principal Investigator: Richard Gunther

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. It is the third-largest international project of its kind.

CNEP began in 1990 with a series of surveys about the election process in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan.  It was expanded in 1993 to include Spain, Chile, Uruguay, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, and Indonesia, as well as questions about support for democracy in newly emerging or re-established democratic regimes.

CNEP recently expanded again to encompass 35 national election surveys in 21 countries including Indonesia, Taiwan, China, Portugal, South Africa, Mozambique, and Mexico.  The surveys also added questions about the quality of democracy, corruption in the electoral process, the nature of identity in multi-cultural societies, and values that affect democracy or give rise to conflict.

Over the past year many of the project’s team leaders and data archiving staff have been engaged in the massive task of standardizing scoring mechanisms across the 35 surveys, some of which included up to 600 variables.  This standardization will allow project leaders to make accurate cross-national comparisons.

This year, project participants met in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, to begin analyzing data. Research teams are looking at areas such as:

• Global patterns. Are certain features of electoral behavior, political attitudes, and intermediation uniform, or are there regional and national patterns?
• Voters, parties, elections and democracies.  How do people in old vs. new democracies and rich vs. poor societies understand democracy?  Do they look at process or substance?  How do they see the integrity of the electoral process?
• Values, ideology and partisan preferences.  Do values play a role in the meaning and significance of left-right politics and party identification? Is this role different in non-Western democracies?

Throughout this analysis, project leaders will be paying special attention to cross-national variations.  Much of the conventional wisdom about voting behavior comes from Western European and North American countries.  With its substantial inclusion of countries in East Asia, Latin America, and Africa, CNEP will be able to test whether these assumptions hold true in other social and cultural contexts.

So far CNEP has produced six books and more than 100 book chapters and journal articles.  The 35 national surveys are also posted on the CNEP web site.  Researchers can download macro reports, as well as questionnaires, SPSS data sets, and other information.  These data sets are one of CNEP’s biggest contributions, providing the basis not only for the CNEP project itself, but for social science research around the world.

For more information, please see the CNEP web site at www.cnep.ics.ul.pt.

Richard Gunther
Professor of Political Science
The Ohio State University