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March 20, 2015
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project is pleased to announce the Second Advance Release of the CSES Module 4 dataset. The dataset and accompanying documentation may be downloaded for free from the Data Center on the CSES website at: www.cses.org
The Second Advance Release contains 33,028 respondents from 17 election studies. The seven newly added election studies are: Australia (2013), Germany (2013), Greece (2012), Iceland (2013), Japan (2013), Poland (2011), and the United States (2012).
By definition, an Advance Release is a preliminary version of a dataset, and thus lacks some of the checking, cleaning, processing, documentation, data, and variables that are usual to the Full Release of a dataset. Many election studies that will eventually be present in the CSES Module 4 Full Release are not available in this file. Advance Releases are provided as a service to the CSES user community, for those analysts who find it valuable to work with preliminary versions of the dataset. Some errors may still be present. We would appreciate being notified of any errors in the dataset or documentation by email to: [email protected]
As we learn of errors, we will post them via the Errata link on the CSES Module 4 download page in the Data Center. We are already aware of an issue where variables with a decimal point in them have more precision to the right of the decimal point than is necessary. An erratum about this is in the aforementioned location.
Furthermore, sometime in the near future we will post a set of syntax statements for reading the dataset into R. These statements will be treated as a beta release and made available for download in a separate, supplemental file at the same location. Once the syntax statements for R are available, we would appreciate your feedback about them and how they can be improved.
We hope that until such time as the Full Release of CSES Module 4 is available, users will find this and future CSES Module 4 Advance Releases to be helpful in their work.
Thank you for your interest in the CSES, and for your support of the project!