Educators trying to establish educational needs and to identify target constituencies and country infrastructures may, at first glance, assume that they have to do this from scratch. Perhaps they will, but a little time spent investigating existing data sources will have a number of benefits:
- less time needed for conducting an investigation
- lower overall costs
- gaps identified that allow more focused research
- general data gaps discovered to consider for more general developmental purposes
There are very few places where nothing is known. And there are very few places where there is no existing source of information. The trick in some closed or authoritarian societies, however, may be getting access to existing information.
International organisations will want to work closely with indigenous ones to access existing data. Often they are unaware of existing repositories of knowledge, particularly if it is of an oral and traditional nature, and they are often amongst the first to assume that something new and impressive must be done. But those working on election programmes need to understand their work within the larger democratisation framework. Good information is needed by those who govern and by civil society. And elections should stimulate the gathering and availability of that information.
Paper, People, or Bytes
Information available in computer databases has the advantage of being easily updated and maintained as well as moved from one place to another. When carefully collected and where software and hardware planning has been done, databases can be remarkable. They can also be frustrating, however, especially in developing countries. Information may be stored in
incompatible formats, or it may be out of date, incomplete, and often locked away. Computers can be a curse as well as a champion of open democracy.
Information on paper does not suffer from compatibility problems. Here the problems are ease of handling, whether the documents and publications are available, preservation, and the cost for revisions.
People See Only As Far As Their Horizon.
Those looking for data will want to look at questions of reliability, accessibility, and cost. In some settings, for example where there there have been authoritarian systems, there may be no official culture of 'freedom of information.' Government bureaucrats may be unresponsible to requests for information. They may consider it priviledged or even a state secret. There is also a danger that data collected by the government has been manipulated for political reasons. So, even if it is made publicly available, it may be of little use to educators.
But even accurate data presents educators with a variety of useability issues. This is because there is a virtual sea of information that requires and careful selection. Educators will want to establish precisely what information they require and how they intend to use it prior to even beginning the search. There will be iterations on these questions, because once some information is available it leads to further questions. Nevertheless focus is essential.
Look in the Obvious Places
Voter rolls and related data provide an immediate starting point if these rolls have been collected nationally or regionally. They will provide basic information about numbers of voters and geographic dispersal. In developing countries and transitional societies, however, voting rolls may be of poor quality. Educators in these types of situations will need to assess how accurate and current the voting rolls are in making a determination about their usability.
In order to establish the rolls, information shoud also exist about registration officials, places where registration has taken place, and possibly even places that were evaluated and then not used. Amongst these places will be many public venues, such as libraries, schools, community halls, clinics, and government offices, as well as more temporary structures linked to community gathering places, such as sports fields, markets, and so on.
Other basic information will be available in forms that can vary from the rudimentary to the highly computerised. Telephone directories can be useful as well as government directories, income tax mailings and address lists (where these are public documents), television and radio licence lists, and market research.
Beyond this basic address and geographic information, there will be government yearbooks and reports on a wide variety of subjects. In poor countries, these reports may have been done by international agencies or international companies interested in development plans and opportunities.
In addition to reports with a developmental focus, many countries have tourist bureaus and tourist publications that contain basic country and travel information. Bus and train timetables, hotel listings, contact offices for local information bureaus all increase the amount of information about the country infrastructure and basic governance.
With the burgeoning of the Internet, it has become possible to do worldwide searches for information about countries. While not all of it may be held inside a country, it is surprising what information may be held in an academic institution. At present, access such institutions in the western and northern hemispheres is greater on the web; but these institutions often host information servers that link organisations and networks in the southern hemisphere.
Beyond these basic sources of information, there may be libraries, government departments, research units linked to national, regional, and local governments, and national and regional statutory research institutes. All of these collect information, some of them will release it upon request and perhaps for a fee. International and domestic NGOs have vast amounts of personal experience and have collated information about countries and are often willing to make this available
more freely than government departments.
Perhaps most useful of all, but not always accessible, is the data collected in political and marketing polls. The reason it is useful is its direct bearing on individual and group attitudes and insights into issues that have a bearing on elections. If it is possible to develop a relationship with collectors of such survey information, it is possible to request them to
reanalyse existing data to address particular questions voter educators may have.
All the sources and organisations listed above have been collecting information not for electoral purposes but for a variety of other reasons over an extended period of time. The information, therefore, has breadth and depth that officials preparing for a specific election period cannot hope to replicate. At the same time, it suffers from the fact that it has to be reorganised in forms that are useful to educators. This may be difficult, time consuming, and costly. Data mismatches, information collected from different periods and with varying degrees of reliability, patchy information with biases towards cities and men, revenue producing activity, and old political debates all conspire against the compiler.
There may even be occasions when the task of assembling this information is larger, more time consuming, and more costly than going out and getting it anew. But this is unlikely in the sphere where educators are working. Focusing on developing an understanding of the voting population, the country infrastructure available to support the educational programme, and getting a grip on educational needs faced by various groups and audiences will all help to ensure that the data
available can be more cost effective than anticipated.
