Nancy Burns
Director of CPS

Center for Political Studies

The Center for Political Studies (CPS) is recognized around the world as a leader in the quantitative study of politics and an innovator in research methods and training. Its scholars investigate the interactions among public opinion, political action, political processes, elections, institutions, parties, and individuals — themes united by a concern for democratic politics. Some efforts are single-investigator projects. Other efforts produce public, scientific goods that bring together broad interdisciplinary communities of scholars from the United States and internationally. Some representative examples are:

Datasets

• The American National Election Studies (ANES) has been providing researchers with a view of the political world through the eyes of ordinary citizens since 1948, producing more publications than any other dataset in political science.
• The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), including collaborators from more than 60 countries, is the most sophisticated, systematic cross-national project on comparative electoral behavior yet undertaken anywhere.
• The World Values Survey (WVS), launched in 1981, is a worldwide investigation of socio-cultural and political change, conducted by an international network of social scientists at leading universities in over 80 societies.

Infrastructure for the Social Sciences

• The Social and Economic Survey Research Institute project is a collaboration to build local capacity for high-quality survey research at Qatar University.
• The Time Shared Experiments in the Social Sciences program assists social scientists in developing and conducting innovative, original data collections and experiments on the telephone and Internet, at no cost to the researcher.

Training Programs

• The Carnegie Scholars program provides summer training and academic year residential programs for faculty and students from Russian universities.
• The Center's Department of State program increases expertise and institutional capacity for conducting public opinion research in the Arab world.
• The Empirical Implications of Theoretical Methodology program trains a new generation of scholars who can better link theory and empirical work.
• The Juvenile Justice Research and Policy Development program trains local students on program evaluation, policy, and community organization.

The work of the Center also has an impact outside of academia. Its faculty members have provided consultation to election commissions, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, non-profit organizations, and universities in the United States and abroad. It has been the training ground for students who go on to work not only in academia, but throughout the private sector and government. Its research results have implications not only for science, but for public policy as well.