The Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS) is a response to the growing number of candidate surveys in the Anglo-saxon world and beyond. More or less regular candidate surveys are conducted in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The rational of the CCS is to harmonise these dispersed efforts and give them a cross-nationally comparable core. The CCS is an internationally coordinated effort. It combines an internationally agreed and locally adapted core questionnaire with questions that try to capture national and election specifics. The core candidate questionnaire specifically focuses at the issue of individualization of electoral campaigns, i.e. the empirical question to which extent the candidates run their own campaigns distinct from those of their parties.
CCS has been running since 2006 and candidate surveys using the CCS wave I questionnaire were conducted in about thirty parliamentary elections. A large part of the data produced is archived at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences and can be ordered using the forms below. More information on the project can be found on the CCS website (comparativecandidatesurvey.org).
