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Canadian Election Study


Since the 1997 general election, Elections Canada has participated in the Canadian Election Study (CES), a university research project initiated in 1965 to examine various aspects of federal elections, such as Canadians' attitudes to elections, the issues and dynamics of election campaigns, political parties and party leaders.

In recent studies, Elections Canada has provided questions dealing with the following issues:

  • attitudes toward Canadian democracy and Elections Canada itself
  • voter turnout
  • youth electoral participation
  • voting and registering by Internet
  • political financing
  • representation of certain groups
  • eligibility criteria for party membership

Elections Canada has developed summary analyses of the answers to its questions for the following elections:

The SPSS databases that the CES has compiled over the years are available on the Queen's University Web site at http://www.queensu.ca/cora/ces.html.

More details on the project are available on the CES Web site at http://ces-eec.org/.