The project’s objectives are (1) to lay bare the implicit scoreboard elected representatives use to evaluate public opinion, (2) to examine how the content, and sender of a public opinion signal affect its evaluation by elected representatives, and (3) to investigate to what extent and how the resulting evaluation of public opinion affects their political actions. POLEVPOP tackles these questions with a comparative, multi-method design covering thirteen different countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg and The Netherlands)[note that in the initial project application, only eight countries were mentioned; so the project has engaged in an even more ambitious data-gathering than initially announced]. The project basically consist of two waves of interviews, surveys, and experimentation with national-level politicians and on parallel citizen surveys and experimentation.
Here’s a detailed overview of the work done so far in the project:
The first two months (January-February 2022) were devoted to the design of survey and interview questions, and to pre-testing the questions. In addition, we collaborated with our international academic partners to design and program the survey instruments.
In March 2022, we fielded an online survey with +- 2,500 citizens in each of the thirteen participating countries (in collaboration with survey company Dynata). These citizen data were used (1) to get public opinion figures for the politician surveys and (2) to serve as a benchmark/comparison for politicians’ answers.
From March to December 2022 we survey-interviewed 214 national members of parliament and ministers face-to-face in Flanders, Belgium. At the same time, we coordinated a similar data collection effort in Wallonia and twelve other countries. In total, 1,185 elected representatives were survey-interviewed in thirteen countries.
From January to April 2023, the comparative survey data were cleaned and merged into one dataset. The open interview questions were transcribed (automatically), checked manually, and then translated into English.
In May 2023, we analyzed the data and wrote short reports on the most important findings that we shared with all politicians that participated in the project.
In June 2023, we organized a meeting in Antwerp with all partners to discuss paper ideas and the first results. In particular, we discussed papers about how politicians rank different criteria of public opinion evaluation (in general) and on politicians’ evaluation of real public opinion information. About 20 paper proposals were discussed during the meeting.
From July 2023 onwards, we started working in smaller groups of authors to write academic papers with the collected data.
In the summer of 2023, preliminary findings of the project were also shared with the broader research community on international conferences such as the ECPR general conference, ICA conference and the IPSA conference.
The period of September 2023-March 2024 was mostly devoted to producing academic output (analyzing data, writing papers, and submitting the first papers to academic journals for review).
In March 2024, another internal meeting was organized in Brussels. Researchers from all country teams joined the meeting and 20 (more or less) finished papers were presented at the meeting.
Currently, 44 papers that draw on data collected in the first 2022 wave of surveys and interviews with politicians and citizens are being written, additionally 5 are submitted to a journal for review, 2 are accepted for publication.
From May 2024 onwards, we also started working in smaller groups on designing the survey instruments (goals, questions, topics, practicalities) for the next 2025 interview wave. The main goal of this second wave is to move forward our understanding of politicians’ evaluation of public opinion signals. Among other things, we are developing:
A survey experiment varying different types of public opinion information to see how politicians react to it.
A batch of survey questions tapping into politicians’ perceptions of public opinion change.
An open-ended survey module on how politicians’ evaluate the arguments citizens have for their opinions.
In July 2024, we also started contacting survey companies in preparation of the citizen survey 2025 (to be fielded parallel to the politician survey).
In the summer of 2024 we also presented output from the 2022 data collection at many different conferences, for instance in Bergen (NoPSA), Barcelona (CAP), Chile (ISPP) and Cologne (EPSA).
