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February 27, 2024
Dear CSES User Community,
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project is delighted to announce the release of Phase 4 of the CSES Integrated Module Dataset (IMD), which is now available for download on the CSES website (www.cses.org).
The CSES IMD combines select variables from CSES Modules 1-5 into one unified, harmonized dataset. The current version of the IMD contains data on 395,797 respondents from 59 polities, covering 230 elections with data from over 800 parties, over a quarter of a century (1996-2021). This dataset includes 406 variables, including measures of party like-dislike, respondent self-placement and respondent placement of parties on the left-right ideological scale, and leader popularity, as well as a host of other variables.
Highlights of this new release of the IMD include:
- From CSES Module 5, the addition of 56 new election studies and 114,714 respondent observations.
- Party/Coalition codes harmonized for CSES Module 5 observations, facilitating easy longitudinal analysis of respondent vote choice, respondent party attachment, and a host of other party-related variables over 25 years.
- A series of NEW variables, including the Party that best represents respondents’ views, Prime Minister/President change, and Election timing by season.
Phase 4 includes several improvements to the data and documentation. A non-comprehensive list of changes made to the previous release can be found on the Errata page for the CSES IMD. The Errata page for the CSES IMD can be found by selecting Download Data on the CSES website, navigating to the CSES IMD page, and then selecting the Errata link in the box to the right of the IMD download page.
Some data that will eventually be included in the CSES IMD are not available in this dataset edition but will be added in future releases. Further, as this is a work in progress, some errors may still be present, and we would appreciate being notified of these or any suggestions by email to: [email protected]
We hope that users will find this version of the CSES IMD helpful to their work.
Thank you for being so supportive of the CSES!