The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a coordinated comparative project that enables the systematic analysis of electoral behavior under globally varying institutional conditions. Freedom House estimates that as of 2013, 118 of the world?s 194 countries are electoral democracies, approximately double the number of democracies just two decades earlier. The CSES is especially well positioned to study this unprecedented and continuing wave of democratization.

The current proposal seeks support to complete the activities of the fourth module of the CSES, and to plan and design the fifth module. The proposed project would provide coordination and leadership for the social science research efforts of over 60 national election studies across the world, thereby ensuring that information about citizens? behavior and attitudes gathered at each site is comparable. In addition to collecting comparable post-election survey data in each nation, information about the institutional arrangements and other social-, political-, and economic-contextual conditions that characterize each participating country are also collected, again in comparable form. CSES designs, receives, cleans, checks, and merges all of these data, and makes them freely and immediately available to the world?s scholarly community via the project website at: http://www.cses.org