Historical Election Results

"Elections are among the most intensely studied political phenomena. On the one hand research into elections is as fundamentally important for the evaluation of the work of political activists and militants and for determining tactics and strategy as it is for the making of political choices. On the other hand academic interest in the mechanism of political processes is directed to the study of voting behaviour. Elections are crucial links for the analysis of the processes by which power is acquired and also constitute a prime area for research into institutionalised conflict situations."
(Els Witte, 1979)

To those working on the ODIS project it was obvious that the data on organisations and persons were also connected with election results. The ODIS format allowed for an efficient centralisation and retention of Flemish-Belgian election results. However, the drawing up of the Elections Record generated questions that are specific to the ODIS project, but at the same time bring to light fundamental problems that concern the whole research area in Belgium.

Until now election results have been collected either for very generalised studies or for studies in particular areas; the result is that a large number of areas remain blank on the map of Flanders. Moreover, because of the diverging objectives of each project, those collections have been based on different criteria. Likewise, series of data have tended to be assembled from very heterogeneous sources and there have also been big differences in the way these were processed in the databases. Furthermore, the data are spread out over various databases, which often are not open to the public or have not been computerised.

ODIS wishes to offer the possibility of rectifying the heterogeneity of the available material by means of a systematic, concerted input. In this way a data file can be made available in which all the data concerning all types of elections are centralised. Moreover, the election results in the database will be linked with details about individuals, parties, organisations, periodicals and archival records.

Given the particular requirements for an Elections index card, the second ODIS workshop was devoted to the problem of collecting, processing, analysing and interpreting the results of political elections in Belgium.

The 2001 ODIS workshop Election results and databases was held in the Universitaire Stichting in Brussels on 23 November 2001.

The proceedings of this workshop were published in the Belgian Review of Philology and History (Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis - BTFG) and separately in offprints in Part One of the Odisea series.

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