Data

NELDA Project Co-Principal Investigator: Susan Hyde, Yale Univesity

Overview

Note: If you use the NELDA data, please see the following working paper, National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy: Which Elections Can Be Lost?

The National Elections across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset provides detailed information on all election events from 1960-2006. To be included, elections must be for a national executive figure, such as a president, or for a national legislative body, such as a parliament, legislature, constituent assembly, or other directly elected representative bodies. In order for an election to be included, voters must directly elect the person or persons appearing on the ballot to the national post in question. Voting must also be direct, or “by the people” in the sense that mass voting takes place. That voting is “by the people” does not imply anything about the extent of the franchise: some regimes may construe this to mean a small portion of the population. However, when voting takes place by committee, institution or a coterie, the “election” is not included. By-elections are not counted as elections for the purpose of this project, unless they take the form of midterm elections occurring within a pre-established schedule. In federal systems, only elections to national-level bodies are included. Cases in which any portion of the seats in a national legislative body are filled through voting are included.

Beyond these basic requirements, elections may or may not be competitive, and may have any number of other ostensible flaws. In fact, this last feature of the dataset is what separates NELDA most clearly from other available datasets on elections.

The unit of observation is the election round. All rounds of an election are coded, regardless of the number of seats remaining to be filled. In the 1994 Ukrainian legislative elections, six rounds were held, with fewer than 10% of the legislative seats up for grabs after 4 rounds of balloting- all six rounds appear in the dataset.

When deciding what counts as a new election, and what is a follow-up round to an election already underway, we ask (1) whether the regime calls the election a new one; (2) whether candidates are allowed and/or required to register again. Positive answers imply a new election. By this rule, the rerun of the second round of the Ukrainian Presidential election of 2004 counts as a third round: the set of continuing candidates was based on rounds one and two. In contrast, when the results of the November 2, 2003 legislative election in Georgia were cancelled, the legislative election of March of the following year is coded as a new election: new registration lists and candidates were allowed.

Indirect elections are not included. Thus, in the 1983 presidential election in the Arab Republic of Yemen, the President was re-elected for a second 5-year term at a meeting of the Constituent People’s Assembly – causing us to drop this election. We do not include Chinese legislative elections because the people do not directly vote on deputies. However, presidential elections which involve an electoral college such as those in the U.S. and South Korea are included because the electoral college mechanically implements the outcome of a popular vote. An example of a special case is the 1970 presidential election in Chile, where the legislature elected Salvador Allende to the presidency after he won a plurality of the popular vote. The Chilean constitution required that if no candidate won a majority of the popular vote, the legislature would select between the top two vote-getting candidates, and tradition dictated that the legislature would select the candidate who received the largest number of votes. The 1970 Chilean election is included because a popular vote took place, and the indirect election within the legislature was determined by the popular vote. Another borderline case is Kenya in the 1970s, where voters cast a ballot for a deputy to parliament knowing that each deputy supports a particular presidential candidate, and that the presidential candidate supported by a majority of elected parliamentarians would be confirmed as president. We counted this peculiar system as a direct election of both the President and the legislature, and we code the two as two separate events (in part, to distinguish the different choices voters may have had with respect to the lists of parliamentary and presidential candidates.)

Most referenda are not included as elections, with one important exception. Some referenda on continued rule are functionally equivalent to presidential elections in single-party regimes, which are included in this study. Therefore, we include referenda when they are direct votes on candidates, most commonly referenda that ask voters whether they would like the incumbent to continue in office or not. If any referendum is a direct vote on the incumbent candidate’s continued rule, it is included as an election. The 1988 referendum on the continued rule of Augusto Pinochet, therefore, counts as an election. Referenda that extend a leader’s term in office but that are not leader-specific are not included as national elections. For example, we do not include constitutional referenda that change the length of term limits or that make some parties illegal. Thus, although there was a referendum on a new constitution in Equatorial Guinea on August 15, 1982 that also provided for an extension of the President’s term in office, the event was not counted as a direct election in the NELDA data.

Sometimes, elections are cancelled immediately before, during or after election day. We include elections if and only if voting on election day has, in fact, commenced. This decision rule holds regardless of whether the balloting was not completed or was eventually cancelled, whether the results were never announced, or whether there were no “consequences” from the voting (such as a power succession).

At present, all independent countries with a population above half a million are covered, with the exception of Western countries (this excludes almost exactly the set of members of the OECD), from 1960 to 2006.

Contact and Data Access

A subset of the data, including electionIDs and basic attributes of each election event are available in a beta version.  To download, click here.