Post Electoral Voter Survey

About the ICENES Post Electoral Voter Survey

The Icelandic National Election Study (ICENES) was first fielded in 1983 where a random sample of voters were surveyed after the Icelandic parliamentary election that year. Since then, a post-electoral voter survey has been conducted after each parliamentary election.

The data is accessible in open access on the DATICE (is. GAGNÍS) website.

Methodology

The survey has for the most part been carried out as a telephone survey. In 1983, however, three methods were used: 2/3 of the answers came from a telephone survey, 1/3 from a home-visit survey and a few answers from a postal survey among those who had a rural open-line telephone. In 2021 part of the sample was sent a shorter version of the survey by email.

The survey’s questions have been on, for example, political participation, attitudes towards democracy and important issues on the political agenda, attitudes towards political parties, the election campaign and socio-economic background of the respondents. Consistency in question wording and the timespan the post-electoral surveys cover, makes ICENES unique in social sciences in Iceland making available comparable data since 1983. The post electoral voter survey is part of the CSES (Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems), an international cooperation project on electoral research which asks the same questions in the states that are part of the CSES.

Data protection

All responses to the Icelandic National Election Study will be handled in accordance with instructions from the Icelandic Data Protection Authority. Respondents are not required to respond to individual questions or the survey as a whole. Participants can withdraw their consent at any point during fieldwork by contacting the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Iceland.

Registers Iceland’s population register serves as the sampling frame for ICENES and additional information is gathered from Statistics Iceland’s administrative data sources. Administrative data involve information such as educational attainment, income deciles, and counting areas. Administrative data will not be linked to survey responses but is used to adjust for unequal response rates among sample subgroups.

Participation in ICENES is confidential and the Social Science Research Institute ensures that responses will not be traced to individual participants. After data collection is completed for the ICENES voter survey, all identifiable information is deleted to ensure anonymity, and the data is made available in open access on the DATICE website and part of the data that relates to the international cooperative project Comparative Study of Electoral Systems is entered into their common database.

ICENES Post-Electoral Voter Surveys