Summary: | This study is the full release of 2001-2006 data from Module 2 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems is an ongoing collaborative program of crossnational research among national election studies designed to advance the understanding of electoral behavior across polities. The project, which is being carried out in over 50 consolidated and emerging democracies, was coordinated by social scientists from around the world who cooperated to specify the research agenda, the study design, and the micro- and macro-level data that native teams of researchers collected within each polity. This collection currently comprises data from surveys conducted in the countries of Albania, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United States. Module 2 focuses on electoral institutions and political behavior, particularly on the fundamental principles of democratic governance: representation and accountability. It aims to examine how well different electoral institutions function as mechanisms by which citizens' views are represented in the policymaking process, and by which citizens hold their elected representatives accountable. This is accomplished by explicitly linking individual attitudes and behaviors to the political context across a variety of settings. The module added a new set of items on citizen engagement and cognition across demographic polities, and expanded the analyses of the first module to examine how voters' choices are affected by the institutional context within which those choices are made. The survey results have been compiled and supplemented with district-level information that provides insight into the respondent's political context, and ...
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