The Democratic Electoral Systems (DES) dataset covers all of the legislative and presidential elections that have taken place in democratic states from 1946 through 2020. It also continues to include information on all elections that are considered democratic by at least one of five different measures of regime type: Democracy and Dictatorship (DD), Freedom House (FH), Polity5, Boix-Miller-Rosato (BMR), and Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The DES 4.1 dataset provides information on electoral rules and party system size for 1,578 lower-house parliamentary and 602 first-round presidential elections in democracies.
Note: The original values of -99 (the information is missing but should theoretically be available) and -88 (there is no single value for this particular variable) have been recoded to ''.'' (missing).
Last updated by source: 2022-12-21
| Dataset type: | Time-Series |
| Dataset level: | Country |
(Bormann & Golder,
2022)
Average district magnitude in an electoral tier. This is calculated as the total number of seats allocated in an electoral tier divided by the total number of districts in that tier.
More about this variableThis is the number of electoral districts or constituencies in an electoral tier.
More about this variableEffective number of electoral parties.
More about this variableThe effective number of electoral parties once the ''other'' category has been ''corrected'' by using the least component method of bounds.
More about this variableThe percentage of the vote going to parties that are collectively known as ''others'' in official election results.
More about this variableThe effective number of parliamentary (legislative) parties.
More about this variableThis is the effective number of parliamentary (legislative) parties once the ''other'' category has been ''corrected'' by using the least component method of bounds.
More about this variableThe percentage of seats won by parties that are collectively known as ''others'' in official election results.
More about this variableThe effective number of presidential candidates.
More about this variableThis is a categorical variable that takes on one of three values indicating the basic type of electoral system used in the elections. 1. Majoritarian 2. Proportional 3. Mixed
More about this variableThis is a categorical variable that provides a more detailed indication of the type of electoral system used in the election. 1. Single-Member-District-Plurality (SMDP) 2. Two-Round System (TRS) 3. Alternative Vote (AV) 4. Borda Count (BC) 5. Block Vote (BV) 6. Party Block Vote (PBV) 7. Limited Vote (LV) 8. Single Nontransferable Vote (SNTV) 9. List Proportional Representation (List PR) 10. Single Transferable Vote (STV) 11. Mixed Dependent (or Mixed Member Proportional) 12. Mixed Independent (or Mixed Parallel)
More about this variableThis is a categorical variable indicating a country's regime type at the end of a given year. The data for this variable come from Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland (2010), which we updated through 2011. 0. Parliamentary democracy 1. Semi-presidential democracy 2. Presidential democracy 3. Civilian dictatorship 4. Military dictatorship 5. Royal dictatorship Not all elections that occur when a regime is classified as a dictatorship (regime = 4-6) are dictatorial. This apparent anomaly has to do with the fact that a country's regime type is coded based on its status at the end of a given year. Elections like those in Argentina 1962, Nicaragua 1983, Philippines 1965, and Thailand 1976 all preceded a democratic collapse in the same year. Although these countries are considered dictatorial at the end of these years, we code these particular elections as democratic and therefore include them in our data set. We should note that we code the 1997 elections in Kenya, the 1999 elections in Guinea Bissau, the 2005 elections in Liberia, the 2006 elections in Mauritania, and the 2008 elections in Bangladesh as democratic even though Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland (2010) do not code these countries as democratic until the following year. The reason for this is that these elections are the primary reason cited by Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland (2010) for their eventual recoding of these countries as democratic. As an example, Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland (2010) do not code Liberia as democratic until 2006 despite the fact that presidential elections took place in October 2005, because the winner of these elections, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, did not officially take office until January 2006. The bottom line is that there are a few observations in our data set of democratic elections where regime indicates that the country was a dictatorship by the end of the year.
More about this variableThis is a categorical variable that indicates the precise type of mixed electoral system that is being used. 1. Coexistence 2. Superposition 3. Fusion 4. Correction 5. Conditional
More about this variableThis is a dichotomous variable that indicates whether different electoral tiers are linked (1) or not (0). Electoral tiers are linked if the unused votes from one electoral tier are used to allocate seats in another electoral tier, or if the allocation of seats in one electoral tier is conditional on the seats received in a different electoral tier.
More about this variableThis indicates the total number of seats in the lower house of the national legislature.
More about this variableThis is a categorical variable that indicates the electoral formula used in the presidential election. 1. Plurality 2. Absolute Majority 3. Qualified Majority 4. Electoral College 5. Alternative Vote
More about this variableThis is a categorical variable that indicates the precise electoral formula used in an electoral tier. 1. Single-Member-District-Plurality (SMDP) 2. Two Round Majority-Plurality 3. Two Round Qualified Majority 4. Two Round Majority Runoff 5. Alternative Vote (AV) 6. Borda Count (BC) 7. Modified Borda Count (mBC) 8. Block Vote (BV) 9. Party Block Vote (PBV) 10. Limited Vote (LV) 11. Single Nontransferable Vote (SNTV) 12. Hare quota 13. Hare quota with largest remainders 14. Hare quota with highest average remainders 15. Hagenbach-Bischoff quota 16. Hagenbach-Bischoff quota with largest remainders 17. Hagenbach-Bischoff quota with highest average remainders 18. Droop quota 19. Droop quota with largest remainders 20. Droop quota with highest average remainders 21. Imperiali quota 22. Imperiali quota with largest remainders 23. Imperiali quota with highest average remainders 24. Reinforced Imperiali quota 25. D'Hondt 26. Sainte-Laguë 27. Modified Sainte-Laguë 28. Single Transferable Vote. Note: Users can find a detailed description of the difference between types in the original codebook.
More about this variableThis is a dichotomous variable that takes on the value 1 if the election is presidential and 0 if the election is legislative.
More about this variableThis indicates the number of legislative seats allocated in electoral districts above the lowest electoral tier.
More about this variableThis indicates the percentage of all legislative seats allocated in electoral districts above the lowest electoral tier.
More about this variable