Brooke Booska
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Allen Hicken
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Political Science / LSA
Program: UROP
Session: Session 5 (2:40pm – 3:30pm)
Authors: Brooke Booska, Ashton Ross, Julia Lippman, Allen Hicken
Abstract
Election data is a crucial resource for government researchers, social scientists, reporters, and the general public. However, obtaining high-quality, comprehensive data on global elections can be challenging as it gets scattered across many obscure websites in various formats. To address this problem, the Constituency Level Elections Archive (CLEA) has compiled a reliable and detailed collection of election data from 180 countries across the world. The CLEA datasets were created by painstakingly searching the web for dependable election records and then coding this data into carefully formatted spreadsheets. These comprehensive yet straightforward spreadsheets are curated by research assistants and then thoroughly checked for quality and quantity. The spreadsheets are then added to the CLEA datasets by a computer science engineer. The spreadsheets can take anywhere from a week to several months to finalize as they comprise a wide range of data such as the region and time, candidates and their votes, parties and their votes, and several proportions relating particular votes to the population. Additionally, there exist many types of voting systems we work with. These range from majority systems to proportional representational systems to semi-proportional systems. All of the datasets housed on the CLEA website can be openly accessed by the public free of charge. Overall, the datasets encompass over 2,200 elections between upper and lower houses across the world. The data aims to be a one-stop resource for researchers, policymakers, scientists, and the general public. By providing an accessible, comprehensive, and reliable collection of data, our datasets serve to facilitate research and a better understanding of the democratic world.
