Chapel Hill Expert Survey

The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) provides estimates of the positions of political parties on ideology, European integration, and a wide range of substantive policy issues. I have served as Principal Investigator of CHES since 2008.

CHES began by measuring the positioning of national political parties in Europe and has developed into a long-running research infrastructure for studying political competition, party-system change, and representation. The cumulative data allow researchers to examine both differences among parties and changes in party positioning over time.

What CHES Measures

CHES asks country experts to evaluate political parties on a common set of dimensions and policy issues. These include:

• General left-right ideology
• Economic left-right positioning
• Social and cultural politics
• European integration
• Immigration
• Environmental and climate policy
• Democratic institutions and political authority
• A growing range of contemporary political issues

Because the same core measures are used across parties and countries, CHES is particularly useful for comparative and cross-national research.

My Role

I joined the CHES team in its early years and have served as Principal Investigator since 2008. My work on the project has included survey design, measurement, data validation, cross-national comparability, and the development of new survey instruments and research applications.

CHES has also been central to my broader research on political measurement. Together with collaborators, I have used CHES data to study the dimensional structure of political competition, the comparability of party positions across countries, voter-party congruence, political cleavages, Euroscepticism, populism, and party responses to major political events.

CHES and Political Measurement

Expert surveys raise interesting methodological questions of their own. How comparable are expert judgments across countries? How many experts are required to estimate a party’s position reliably? Which questions provide distinct information, and which are largely redundant?

Several of my current projects use CHES to address these questions directly. This work treats the expert survey not simply as a source of political data, but as a measurement instrument whose properties can themselves be studied and improved.

Data and Project Information

CHES data, questionnaires, documentation, and additional information about the project are publicly available through the official Chapel Hill Expert Survey website.

Visit the Chapel Hill Expert Survey website

For publications using CHES and related research, see my Publications and Research pages.