Database of Electoral Systems and the Personal Vote

Last updated: 11 October 2007

Joel W. Johnson
PhD Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of California, San Diego

Jessica S. Wallack
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego

This page contains the Database of Electoral Systems and the Personal Vote. The database updates and expands the coding of electoral systems presented in Gaviria et al's (2003) Database of Particularism (also below). Data now cover up to 180 countries from 1978-2005 and distinguish electoral systems by the degree to which electoral institutions create incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote - as described theoretically in Carey and Shugart (1995) and Gaviria el al. (2003) - including the amount of vote pooling among co-partisan candidates, the amount of parties' control over ballot access, and whether voters cast their votes for candidates or parties. The database also contains several variables that rank-order electoral systems by tier, distinguish mixed-member and other multi-tier electoral systems, capture district magnitude (in two ways), and record election years.

We thank you for your interest in the database. Please feel free to email Joel with comments, corrections, or information that would be helpful in filling in the remaining gaps. We hope the database can be updated and expanded in the future as more information becomes available.


Right-click on either of the following links to download and save the dataset.
Database in Excel format. The Excel version includes complete coding and source information.
Database in Stata format.
For more information, the following files contain a brief description of the dataset and a fuller description of the theory behind the variables and their coding (pdf).
Notes on updates and corrections here (MSWord document).

If you use the data, please cite as:

Johnson, Joel W. and Jessica S. Wallack. [year.] Electoral Systems and the Personal Vote. http://dss.ucsd.edu/~jwjohnso/espv.htm



For the previous version of the data, the Database of Particularism (Excel), as described in Gaviria et al. (2003), click here.

References:
Carey, John and Matthew Soberg Shugart. 1995. "Incentives to Cultivate a Personal Vote," Electoral Studies
Gaviria, Alejandro, Ugo Panizza, Ernesto Stein, and Jessica Wallack, (2003). "Political Particularism Around the World," World Bank Economic Review 17(1):133-143.