HEИндивидуална стипендия2023–2025

GAPREP · O Social Groups, Where Art Thou? A cross-national and longitudinal analysis of the place of social groups at the core of the party-voter representative linkage

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2023-10-01 → 2025-09-30
Финансиране от ЕС: 187 624 €
Участници: 1
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Политическите партии и към кои социални групи се обръщат в своите програми, например към младите или етническите малцинства. Това помага да се разбере дали демокрациите представят всички граждани справедливо и кой получава политическо внимание.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

O Social Groups, Where Art Thou? A cross-national and longitudinal analysis of the place of social groups at the core of the party-voter representative linkage

Democratic representation depends on the relationship between political parties and voters. Yet research has focused almost exclusively on whether parties' policy positions match voters' preferences, overlooking a fundamental question: whom are parties actually talking to? Political parties regularly appeal to specific social groups—women, workers, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, young people, and others—in their campaign communications. These group appeals matter because once in office, parties shape policies affecting social groups' access to resources, power, and equitable treatment, and group appeals signal which voter constituencies parties claim to represent. Without understanding which groups parties appeal to, we cannot fully evaluate whether democracies represent all citizens fairly. The current knowledge gap about parties’ appeals to social groups of this kind exists partly because analyzing group appeals across countries and time periods was prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. The GAPREP project tackled this challenge by developing automated text analysis methods using supervised-LLMs to detect and measure group appeals in party manifestos. The project analyzed over 850 election manifestos from eight European democracies (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, and UK) spanning 1970-2025, creating the first comprehensive cross-national database on parties' group appeals. We also conducted survey experiments in Ireland and the UK to test whether voters actually feel represented when parties appeal to groups they belong to. The project provides researchers worldwide with tools and data to study previously unmeasurable aspects of representation. The output sheds light on which social groups receive political attention and which remain marginalized as well as reveals voters’ evaluations of parties’ representative intentions, both are aspects that matter for democracy. Understanding which groups parties claim to represent helps citizens make informed voting decisions, enables systematic assessment of political inclusiveness, and contributes to strengthening democratic trust and legitimacy across Europe.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

The party-voter representative linkage is central to modern democracies. Because political parties, once in office, steer fiscal and social policies, the social groups they claim to represent in their group appeals matter for distributing tangible public goods and specially the equitable treatment of minority groups by the government. While many party politics studies are devoted to parties’ policy appeals and their role in political representation, group appeals have received little attention thus far, leaving a theoretical and empirical gap. Recent studies begin to address this oversight but these works are still few and limited in scope, using either longitudinal, single-country data, or cross-national, time-limited data. Combining insights from political, communication, and computational linguistics, GAPREP will build a new software library (SL) for the computational analysis of political texts (R package). The SL will then be used to analyse group appeals in more than 950 election manifestos in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK between 1949-2022, building a new and publicly available dataset. Together with cross-national historical survey data on voters’ demographics and party preferences from the 1980s onwards (given available data), advanced statistical modelling will reveal how representative of social groups parties have been over the past 40 years. Pushing scholarship on the party-voter linkage still further, the project will also use a unique vignette survey experiment to study the underlying mechanism of this linkage by examining voters’ reactions to parties’ group appeals. Combining these efforts, findings will illuminate social groups' access to power, and social and political equality. Offering a new perspective on the party-voter linkage, the project aims to positively contribute to voters’ contemporary low levels of political trust, which is central to the healthy functioning of modern liberal democracies.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

STICHTING VU · AmsterdamКоординаторНидерландия