Abby Jodloski
Pronouns: She/her
Research Mentor(s): Allen Hicken
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Political Science / LSA
Program:
Authors: Abby Jodloski, Allen Hicken, Julia Lippman
Session: Session 4: 1:40 pm – 2:30 pm
Poster: 12
Abstract
Elections are a fundamental aspect of any country’s political system, and can be examined to indicate trends of political transformations, majority parties, and voters’ opinions. This research involves using untranslated source data for lower house (one of two chambers in a bicameral legislature) elections from every country around the world to create a standardized repository of election data with consistent variables through the Constituency Level Election Archive (CLEA). So far, it has documented 2000+ elections from 180 countries and territories. This research does not come to a conclusion or result, rather, it expands the existing source documents by translating it to English in an easily readable, accessible, and transferable format that allows comparison between countries to become far easier. The methodologies in the research constitute mostly data analysis, in which researchers find raw election data and code it to a standardized spreadsheet according to the CLEA Codebook. Multiple variables are accounted for, such as valid votes, party vote share, candidate vote share, and total seats won. In adding elections to the database until every election in history is coded, this work will allow future research to flow more smoothly for the easy comparison of elections, which is critical for educators, policymakers, and researchers to understand the nature of constituency level elections.
