Academic research

American Political Science Association: (APSA); a US professional society. The Association’s website has useful material on elections at “s.8 Representation and Electoral Systems”.

Australian Social Science Data Archive: an Australian online interchange for academic writing in the social sciences, which amongst other resources hosts the Australian Political Attitudes Surveys (1969-77) and Australian Election Study (1987-), which are series of studies on the political attitudes and behaviour of the Australian electorate.

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems: (CSES); a collaborative program of research among election study teams from around the world, hosted by the University of Michigan.

Centre for Social Software for Elections (CSSEAC): an association of European academics concerned with the study the election systems through the “framework recently introduced by Balinski and Laraki”.

Democratic Audit of Australia: an academic collaboration relating to electoral and political matters, hosted by the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne.

Economist Intelligence Unit: a component business of the Economist magazine which publishes material on political circumstances in world nations, including the Democracy Index, a survey which measures the state of democracy in 167 countries. The Index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. The Index was first produced in 2006, with updates produced in 2008, 2010 and 2011.

ElectionLawBlog: blogsite of prominent US electoral specialist Professor Richard Hasen.

ICPSR: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Established in 1962 as a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, ICPSR is a key component of the infrastructure of social science research in the United States. ICPSR maintains and provides access to a large archive of social science data for research and instruction (over 8,000 discrete studies/surveys with more than 60,000 datasets). ICPSR is a membership-based organization, with over 640 member colleges and universities around the world.

American National Election Study: (ANES); an academically-run national survey of voters in the United States, conducted before and after every presidential election, presenting data from 1948 onward. ANES was formally established by a National Science Foundation grant in 1977. The study has been based at the University of Michigan since its origin and, since 2005, has been run in partnership with Stanford University.

Polity Project: an academic resource for comparative data between national political systems, including electoral system characteristics, specifically the Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2010.

US Election Statistics Resource Guide – hosted by the Library of Congress.

Voting Power and Procedures centre: an international centre (located in the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics) for technical research into the theory, methodology and practice of voting power and its applications. Initially concerned with a project c.2002 to advise on the reform of voting rights for state-members of the IMF, the centre later focused on the design of national and international governmental voting systems as well as decision-making processes for corporate mergers and acquisitions strategies.