Coding of Non-Voters in Vote Choice Variables: Datafile: A2028

There are errors in the datafile involving the coding of non-voters (variable A2028) for select election studies. A number of respondents who indicated that they did not vote were mistakenly coded in a response category reserved for identifying inconsistent responses.

The seven election studies affected, a total of 8755 records, are: Chile (1999), Spain (2000), Hong Kong (1998), Hong Kong (2000), Iceland (1999), Israel (1996), and Portugal (2002).

Analysts may correct these errors by downloading the following correction file and merging it into the original dataset:

Download the correction file by clicking here - a2028.zip.

The raw data file ("a2028.txt") within "a2028.zip" contains three variables, comma-delimited, with one record per line.

Variable A1003 is found in columns 1-8.
Variable A1009 is found in columns 10-13.
Variable A2028 is found in column 15.

The analyst will want to follow thse steps to merge the correction file into their original CSES Module 1 file:

1. Unzip raw data file "a2028.txt" from the file "a2028.zip".
2. Read the correction file "a2028.txt" into a statistical package of your choice. Be sure to delete the first record, which is a header, if it is not needed for this step.
3. Sort both the original and correction files by two variables: A1003 and A1009.
4. Over-write variable A2028 in the original file with variable A2028 from the correction file.

Analysts are advised to check file distributions both before and after the merge to be confident that their code executed correctly, and affected only variable A2028 for the 8755 cases that appear in the correction file.