A Brief History

The seeds for what became the Comparative National Election Project (CNEP) -- a collaborative research network and partnership among scholars who conduct and coordinate election studies across diverse political systems worldwide, using a common core questionnaire to achieve comparability -- were first sown in conversations among political science colleagues Paul Beck, Russ Dalton, and Scott Flanagan at Florida State University in the mid-1980s. They lamented the absence of cross-national election studies with comparable survey questions and theoretical frames and aspired to design truly cross-national surveys of voting behavior.

These seeds germinated in the ensuing years into study designs that drew upon the early Columbia University community voting studies of the 1940-1950s to focus on the flow of information to voters through personal discussion networks; newspaper, television, radio (and later internet) media, and organizational intermediaries (including political parties) beyond the well-established variables from University Michigan American national election studies. 

The first wave of surveys involved Germany, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan.  Leading voting behavior scholars of each of the four original countries (Hiroshi Akuto, Ken’ichi Ikeda, and Brad Richardson for Japan; Max Kaase, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, and Manfred Kuechler for Germany, Bob Huckfeldt for the U.S., and John Curtice and Anthony Heath for Great Britain) joined the Florida State quartet in the late 1980s for group meetings in Wakulla Springs Florida (sponsored by Florida State University), Columbus Ohio (sponsored by The Ohio State University), and Bloomington Indiana (sponsored by Indiana University) to plan the design and questionnaire of the initial four comparative national surveys. They covered the 1990 elections in a newly merged East and West Germany, the 1992 U.S. and British elections, and the 1993 Japanese election. 

The German and U.S. election studies adopted ambitious designs involving interviews with snowball samples of inter-personal discussion partners, analyses of newspaper and television campaign content, and self-reported contacts by political parties and candidates. The British survey involved a leave-behind questionnaire to measure core CNEP items. Although funding and field-work limitations of later surveys proved that these designs were too ambitious, they provided the full model for CNEP conceptualizations as described by Beck, Dalton, and Huckfeldt in a 1988 essay outlining the theoretical bases for the project. 

In the ensuing decade, the by-now titled Comparative National Election Project (CNEP) spread to other country settings. Dick Gunther and José Ramón Montero oversaw a 1993 Spanish survey and recruited surveys in other Spanish speaking countries (Chile, Uruguay) and beyond (Bulgaria, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, and Italy) into the project. By then, Dick Gunther had joined Paul Beck (now at Ohio State University) as co-coordinators of CNEP, with Gunther undertaking the homogenization of the comparable items in each new survey and the combining all existing surveys into a merged file. By the mid-2000s, repeat elections in some of the earlier countries and new countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia brought another 13 surveys into the project. With each new phase, research themes were expanded in the survey questionnaires to address the most recent developments in elections, especially the rise of new democracies, and allow comparisons with the more traditional ones. 

Several features have distinguished CNEP through its four decades:

• The surveys have been built around a common core questionnaire of cross-nationally comparable items, standard in all surveys, involving demographic characteristics and traditional voting behavior as well as emerging dimensions of electoral competition such as populism, polarization, democratic attitudes, threats to democracy, and party system fragmentation. As new items have had to be accommodated, some of the older items have given way to keep the common core questionnaires of manageable length while maintaining continuity with earlier surveys. 
• CNEP produces both cross-nationally comparable voter surveys in single elections and a growing archive of such surveys since 1990. The national surveys have been harmonized around the standard common core items, then combined into a single data set of voters in 75 national elections that has merged all of the CNEP items. The merged file facilitates cross-national analysis of voting behavior across almost four decades. It also supports analysis within the 17 countries that contain surveys for more than a single election: the U.S. (7 elections): Indonesia and Spain (5); Chile, Colombis, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, South Africa (4); Hong Kong and Taiwan (3); Argentina, Britain, Hungary, Portugal, and Uruguay (2).     
• CNEP is the product of collaboration among leading voting behavior scholars in their home countries whose surveys have reported on the election studied using comparable CNEP core questions. They typically brought their own funding to the project, including grants from their national science foundations (e.g., in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan), private foundations, and universities.
• A CNEP community of voting behavior scholars has developed through a series of conferences over the course of the project. From the beginning, the conferences have focused on development/maintenance of the common core questionnaire, the integration of new themes to reflect new electoral developments and an expanded group of countries, and the sharing of research results. Conferences mostly have been funded by their host universities in, e.g., Chile, Colombia, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the U.S. 
• As election polling methods have evolved from face-to-face to telephone to the internet, CNEP data-collection methods too have changed following this same trajectory. Internet surveys are now most common, though they are not feasible in some of the less developed countries.
• Numerous scholars have used CNEP data in comparing voting behavior across elections and in analyzing the survey results in their own countries. These results are published in Democracy, Intermediation, and Voting on Four Continents (2007), Voting in Old and New Democracies (2016), and various refereed journals.

The aspirations of its founders in the mid-1980s have been realized. CNEP has been a leader in comparative studies of voting behavior across the world. Through April 2026, it includes 75 individual surveys in 30 countries and Hong Kong that are available for analysis, with more to come soon; most recently, 75 of these surveys have been merged into one data file of over 125,000 respondents. The study of voting behavior has become a truly comparative enterprise.

2025-2026 is a time of transition for CNEP.  After almost 40 years as co-coordinators of the project, Paul Beck and Dick Gunther are retiring from their leadership role. The hosting of the project has relocated from the Mershon Center at Ohio State, which has generously supported CNEP in so many significant ways, to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona. Mariano Torcal (UPF) and Bob Mattes (University of Strathclyde) have assumed the roles of co-coordinators. This transition is complete.  A new website is now available through UPF and the harmonization and merging of recent surveys has been undertaken by Mariano and his expert staff there. A total of 75 CNEP-harmonized surveys are now archived and more soon will be in the queue to be processed.  Also included in the new merged file (Merge 75) are the original German and Japanese surveys, which were not available before. Mariano and Bob are developing grant proposals to secure more central funding for surveys and data processing in the CNEP tradition. They have made impressive progress in executing the transition and improving CNEP going forward.