The Global Elections Lab seeks to foster research on legislative elections around the world. As a preliminary step toward that end, we’re focused on original data collection efforts in understudied contexts — be they single-party or competitive authoritarian regimes; villages, towns, and counties; contemporary backsliding democracies; or historical moments otherwise lost to the archives. In other words, we study elections off the beaten path:
- Chinese villager committee elections from the late 1990s;
- recent elections to Armenian and Kyrgyz city councils;
- elections for North Carolina’s boards of county commissioners since 1870;
- Cambodia’s recent commune-level elections;
- Brazilian state elections from the 1960s and 1970s;
- Solidarity’s surprise victory in Poland’s seminal 1989 elections;
- recent parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Russia, and Vietnam;
- and a whole lot more!
In addition to our primary goal of furthering the study of the world’s elections, the Lab was founded to achieve three related goals:
- To kindle intellectually exciting discussions and a passion for research amongst our undergraduate lab members. College should be about more than simply acquiring knowledge and skills; it’s also where students and faculty can push each other to ask original and meaningful questions, codesign rigorous strategies to answer them, and overcome obstacles in the process of uncovering the answers. The Lab provides a venue to question, to share, and to learn.
- To incubate original research projects — individually, in pairs, and in teams — that will yield working papers, senior theses, and peer-reviewed journal articles. The best way to learn the art and science of social scientific research is to get your feet wet, and the point of gathering data is to answer questions about the way the world works. The Lab is a space where ideas are challenged and sharpened, where peers share tools and strategies, and where research collaborations are born.
- To connect like-minded researchers and facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, approaches, and tools. The study of elections has largely been pursued in two independent silos: democracies and nondemocracies. Digging up data may require archival, webscraping, or machine learning skills — or plain old elbow grease. Questions pursued in one context may yield fascinatingly distinct answers in another context. The Lab intentionally encourages research diversity rather than specialization, and welcomes work-in-progress presentations from elections scholars anywhere.
