Electoral Law Indicators

 

The ELECLAW indicators measure the degree of inclusion of the electoral franchise for three categories of potential voters or candidates: resident citizens, non-resident citizens and non-citizen residents. They cover both the right to vote (VOTLAW) and the right to stand as candidate (CANLAW) in three types of elections (presidential/executive, legislative and referendum) at four levels (European, national, regional and local).

For each category of persons, the ELECLAW indicators measure on a 0 to 1 scale the degree of inclusion of electoral laws along two dimensions. First, eligibility restrictions determine the category of persons who have the right to vote or stand as candidate. Second, access restrictions determine how those eligible can exercise their right to vote by means of voter registration and voting methods. Please consult the ELECLAW explanatory note for a detailed description of our coding principles, coding scales, and aggregation rules.

The current version – ELECLAW 3.0 – includes the 28 Member States of the European Union based on the electoral laws in 2013 and 2015 (two different datasets), and the Americas based on electoral laws in 2015. For previous versions see the archive of data and explanatory notes below. For the EU-28 only very few electoral laws changed from 2013 to 2015 and changes that happened were mostly minor ones. The current visualisation of the ELECLAW indicators therefore only covers laws in 2015. You can download the EU-28 data for 2013 – which is updated, corrected, and newly aggregated according to the rules of ELECLAW 3.0 – as a part of the latest ELECLAW Masterfile.

The ELECLAW indicators have been calculated on the basis of the qualitative information included in our National Electoral Laws and Electoral Rights databases and our Country Report series on Access to Electoral Rights. While the information and coding have been thoroughly checked, there may be residual inaccuracies. Please contact us also if you have found any error in our coding or if you have questions about how we have applied the coding rules specified in our explanatory paper.

The ELECLAW Indicators have been developed by Jean-Thomas Arrighi, (European University Institute), Rainer Bauböck (European University Institute) and Samuel D. Schmid (European University Institute) in consultation with Maarten Vink (University of Maastricht) and Derek Hutcheson (University of Malmö) and with the assistance of Lorenzo Piccoli (European University Institute) and Dejan Stjepanovic (Université Catholique de Louvain).

The indicators are made available freely for non-commercial use by the general public. We ask users to acknowledge its source when using the data. Please cite the current version as follows:

EUDO CITIZENSHIP Observatory (2016). ELECLAW Indicators. Version 3.0. San Domenico di Fiesole: European University Institute.

Current version:

 

Archived versions:

  • Download the ELECLAW Masterfile (version 2.0 last updated, November 2015) and read the ELECLAW 2.0 explanatory note. Please note that, besides using somewhat different coding and aggregation rules than ELECLAW 3.0, this version contains a few coding errors that have been corrected in the October 2016 version.
  • Download the ELECLAW Masterfile (version 1.0, last updated, July 2015) and read the ELECLAW 1.0 explanatory note. Please note that this version contains several coding errors that have been corrected in the November 2015 version.