Data
Political Parties (CHESS: Chapel Hill Expert Survey Series)
The Chapel Hill expert survey series (CHESS) estimates party positioning on European integration, ideology and
policy issues for national parties in a variety of European countries. The first survey was
conducted in 1999, the next in 2002, and the most recent in 2006. Preparations for the 2010 survey are underway.
The number of countries increased
from 14 Western European countries in 1999 to 24 current or prospective EU members in 2006 (not including 5 candidate member states), and
the number of national parties from 143 to 227. Common to all surveys are questions on parties'
general position on European integration, several EU policies, general left/right, economic
left/right, and galtan; later surveys contain also questions on non-EU policy issues. The dataset
1999-2006ChapelHillsurvey.sav joins up data from the 1999, 2002, and 2006 Chapel Hill
expert surveys. Below we list the SPSS dataset, codebook, and questionnaires for each survey year
as well as the combined dataset.
These surveys have been possible thanks to research grants from the European Union Center for Excellence, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
2006 Chapel Hill expert survey
- SPSS expert_means data
- SPSS expert_raw data
- Codebook expert_means
- Codebook expert_raw data
- Questionnaire EU
2002 Chapel Hill expert survey
- SPSS expert_means data
- SPSS expert_raw data
- Codebook expert_means
- Codebook expert_raw data
- Questionnaire_West
- Questionnaire_East
** 2002 raw data to be posted soon **
1999 Chapel Hill expert survey
How to cite?
- In papers using the 2006 or 2002 EU survey or the 2007 Candidate-countries dataset, please refer to Liesbet Hooghe, Ryan Bakker, Anna Brigevich, Catherine de Vries, Erica Edwards, Gary Marks, Jan Rovny, Marco Steenbergen, Milada Vachudova, "Reliability and Validity of Measuring Party Positions: The Chapel Hill Expert Surveys of 2002 and 2006," forthcoming with European Journal of Political Research.
- In papers using the 1999 dataset, please refer to Marco Steenbergen and Gary Marks (2007). "Evaluating Expert Surveys," European Journal of Political Research, 46(3): 347–366.
2007 Candidate-countries survey
This website contains also a mini-survey conducted in 2007 in five candidate countries: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey. To cite, please use the Hooghe et al. reference above.
Ray-Marks-Steenbergen survey
The combined dataset Ray-Marks-Steenbergen merges the 1999 Chapel Hill survey with the Leonard Ray dataset for the time points 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996. We relabeled the original variable names and party ids in the Ray data to make them consistent with those in the Chapel Hill survey. This makes it also possible for researchers to combine this dataset with the 2002 and 2006 data. The original Ray dataset is available from Ray's website.
How to cite?
- In papers using the combined Ray-Marks-Steenbergen dataset, please refer to Marco Steenbergen and Gary Marks (2007). "Evaluating Expert Surveys," European Journal of Political Research, 46(3): 347–366; and to Leonard Ray (1999). "Measuring party orientations toward European integration: Results from an expert survey," European Journal of Political Research, 36(2): 283–306.