The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project is pleased to announce the First Advance Release of the CSES Module 5 dataset. The dataset and accompanying documentation may be downloaded for free from the Data Center on the CSES website at: www.cses.org The core objective of CSES Module 5 is to examine citizens’ attitudes towards political elites, majority rule, and out-groups in representative democracy. The module will allow researchers to account for variation in the contestation of political elites and ‘populist’ attitudes across democracies, to examine how such perceptions shape citizens electoral behavior, and to explore the relationship between the rise of populist parties and the distribution of populist attitudes cross-nationally. This First Advance Release contains 20,792 respondents from 13 election studies: Austria (2017), Chile (2017), Germany (2017), Greece (2015), Hong Kong (2016), Hungary (2018), Ireland (2016), Italy (2018), Lithuania (2016), Montenegro (2016), South Korea (2016), Taiwan (2016), and United States (2016). 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 5 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. We would appreciate being notified of any errors in the dataset or documentation by email to: [email protected] We hope that until such time as the Full Release of CSES Module 5 is available, users will find this and future CSES Module 5 Advance Releases to be helpful in their work.
