2014 - Chapel Hill Expert Survey Data

The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) has made public its most recent data for 2014. LIEPP Assistant Professor, Jan Rovny, serves as a principal investigator on the project, the results of which have contributed to several projects under LIEPP's Evaluation of Democracy (EvalDem) Research Group.

CHES History: The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) is an academic project started in 1999 at the Department of Political Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It collects policy and ideological stances of the leadership of national political parties for all member states of the European Union (EU), as well as for EU candidate countries, Norway, and Switzerland. The first survey was conducted in 1999, with subsequent waves in 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014. The number of countries increased from 14 Western European countries in 1999 to 24 current or prospective EU members in 2006 to 31 countries in 2014. In this time, the number of national parties grew from 143 to 268. The data can be connected to previous surveys reaching back to 1984.

Objective: CHES data serve three main purposes. First, the surveys monitor the ideological positioning of parties on a general left–right dimension and, since 1999, also on the economic left–right and the social left–right dimension (‘new politics’ or green/alternative/libertarian (GAL) to traditional/authoritarian/nationalist (TAN) dimension). Second, the surveys bring together data on party stances towards the EU. Third, the data measure party stances on various specific policy issues, such as immigration, redistribution, decentralization, and environmental policy. 

LIEPP & CHES: Closely connected to the aims of the EvalDem axis of LIEPP, CHES data have allowed researchers to investigate dynamic trends in party positions, and track the relationships between the ideological placement of parties, their position on European integration, and on other preferences on particular policy issues. Specific EvalDem publications have used the CHES data, for example, in evaluating the role of ethnic minority politics on the formation of democratic party systems in Eastern Europe, as well as in assessing the impact of immigration on party competition in Eastern Europe. Ongoing EvalDem projects are using the CHES data to estimate political responses to the economic crisis in Europe.

The core of the CHES questionnaire consists of five sets of items:

(1) general party positioning on the left–right dimension, (2) party positioning on economic left–right, (3) party positioning on the GAL–TAN dimension, (4) general party positioning on European integration, and (5) positioning on specific policy issues.

The current CHES research team consists of the following scholars: 

Ryan Bakker, Erica Edwards, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Jelle Koedam, Filip Kostelka, Gary Marks, Jonathan Polk, Jan Rovny, Gijs Schumacher, Marco Steenbergen, and Milada Vachudova

For details and data, see: chesdata.eu 

Publications presenting the results of Chapel Hill Expert Survey Data : 

• Jan ROVNY et al., Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data, Journal of Research and Politics, Research and Politics, January-March 2017, Research and Politics, January-March 2017: 1–9.