Comparative Structural Survey Election Management Bodies EMS (version 1, European and International Data, February 2019)

The Electoral Management Survey (EMS) was conducted between July 2016 and October 2017. It consists of two parts: a structural survey filled out by one senior EMB official in each EMB surveyed, and a personnel survey sent to EMB employees. The EMS initially focused on Europe, while a sister survey implemented by the Electoral Integrity Project, ELECT, was disseminated to non-European countries (Norris et al., 2016). In the first half of 2017, the countries that had not responded to either the EMS or the ELECT survey were contacted again. Effort was made to contact all bodies that perform any of the major functions of EMBs, as defined by the International IDEA Handbook on Electoral Management Design (Wall et al., 2006). In total, 177 countries that held elections between 2012 and 2017, and that were not micro-states (population < 100,000), were identified. EMB contact information was missing for 21 countries. A total of 156 countries were contacted, and 72 countries responded to either EMS or ELECT, resulting in a response rate of 46%. For more on the Electoral Management Network, see: www.electoralmanagement.com. More detailed description and discussion of these data can be found in: James, S., Garnett, H., Loeber, L. and van Ham, C. 2019. Improving Electoral Management: the Organizational Determinants of Electoral Integrity. Special issue on Improving Electoral Management, in International Political Science Review, 40(3): 298-312. Please note that these data can be merged with structural EMB data from the ELECT survey, available on Harvard Dataverse.