Gwendolyn McGuire
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Allen Hicken
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Political Science / LSA
Program:
Authors:
Session: Session 4: 1:40 pm – 2:30 pm
Poster: 5
Abstract
For decades, various states around the world have conducted hundreds of constituency-level (i.e. lower and upper chamber federal elections) elections which make their governments run. Thousands of details on these elections including date, country, region, candidate, party, and more are collected by each country’s respective data collection agency. This information can be difficult to obtain and comprehend with obstacles such as language barriers, unique electoral systems, or the information simply being not readily available to the public. As understanding elections is important to understanding a place’s politics and culture, this information is of use to researchers studying a certain time or place in the world. This project aims to alleviate these issues by compiling and coding such data into uniform spreadsheets, making them more accessible. The CLEA team finds data sources, inputs them into spreadsheets using a designated format, codifies political parties, verifies the information, then releases it in batches to the public. The team also takes input and corrections from the public to make the data as accurate as possible. This past academic year, research assistants have inputted election data from Wales, Nepal, Russia, Nauru, Belarus, and more. CLEA has and continues to catch up on over a century’s worth of elections and continues to add to its growing repository. As long as officials continue to be democratically elected, the project will not conclude, continuing to provide help to researchers working on their own projects and further contributing to a large body of academia, especially in political science.
