The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project is an international collaboration between surveys conducted after national elections. It is designed to facilitate comparative research into electoral behaviour, focusing in particular on the impact of political and electoral systems on how people vote. This aim is achieved by fielding a common set of questions immediately after each participating country’s national election. This ESRC funded project ensures British participation in the second round by administering the current CSES module of questions shortly after 2005 British general election and by undertaking analysis of the resulting data alongside the data collected by other participating countries. The analysis will concentrate on two sets of debates. The first is between those who regard democracy as primarily a means of securing representation and those who consider it a mechanism for making government accountable. The CSES data make it possible to address this debate by looking at how the electoral system influences how people vote and their satisfaction with the way democracy works in their country. The second is about the impact of electoral systems on turnout, in particular whether proportional representation is more likely to encourage people to vote than first-past-the-post and if so why.
Research Team: Dr Steve Fisher (Principal Investigator), Laurence Lessard-Phillips, Dr John Curtice, and Sara Hobolt.