Mershon's faculty and graduate student grants funded some extraordinary research last summer! This week we highlight the curatorial work of  Political Science Emeritus Professors Paul Beck and Richard Gunther.

2024 has been an especially productive year for the Comparative National Election Project.

CNEP scholars from over 30 countries have continued to publish drawing upon data from their own country surveys as well as from the rich combination of cross-national surveys. For the most recent examples of cross-national analyses see Gonzalez et al. 2024 and Beck 2023 among the many works cited in the Publications section of the CNEP website. Grants are in place to fund 2024 surveys in Mexico, Uruguay, and the U.S. and for the next 4 years in in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and The Netherlands. It is hoped that a pending grant will support surveys in six 2024 and 2025 African elections.

Beyond this stream of scholarly output and seeding for future research, 2024 has been notable for important developments in CNEP administration and infrastructure. Tom Wood and Chip Eveland have joined the OSU leadership team of Paul Beck and Richard Gunther to carry the Project into the future. Funded by a generous two-year grant from the Mershon Center, Graduate Associate Connor Tragesser has joined the OSU team to employ his data management expertise in assisting in the standardization and merging of the expected “avalanche” of CNEP surveys as they come in. The Korbel School for International Studies at the University of Denver, through the leadership of Mariano Torcal and Aaron Schneider, also has become an active participant in the sponsorship of CNEP work.

What continues to distinguish CNEP is its reliance on surveys conducted across the globe using a comparable core of over 100 questions focused on various aspects of citizen voting behavior. Its focus has expanded greatly over the years beyond an original concentration in the 1990s on the role of media, interpersonal, and organizational information intermediaries to include the Internet and social media, socio-political values, attitudes towards democracy and the integrity of elections, and threats to democracy, The Project now contains over 70 surveys, with more to come, in 30 countries. To facilitate analysis of the common core questions, results from 66 of the surveys have been merged into a single data file based on over 114,000 respondents -- and those numbers are growing. Multiple surveys are available in 17 countries to track changes over-time.