Descripción del proyecto
¿Prometer servir? Investigación de cómo las promesas electorales conforman las preferencias políticas
Una característica clave de la democracia representativa son las promesas políticas. Las realizan candidatos o partidos políticos y se basan en cuestiones importantes y temas estratégicos. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos PLEDGEDEM arrojará luz sobre el vínculo entre los políticos y sus campañas, los votantes y el papel de los medios de comunicación. Estudiará la importancia de las promesas electorales en la decisión de voto y la responsabilidad, y pretende crear una nueva agenda de investigación que redefina la forma en que los científicos ven el vínculo entre los partidos y los votantes. La labor del proyecto conducirá a un conocimiento más profundo de cómo los votantes eligen los partidos y cómo se comportan con los que traicionan su confianza.
Objetivo
Election pledges are supposedly a vital part of representative democracy. Yet we do not in fact know whether and how pledges matter for vote choice and accountability. This project thus asks: Do election pledges matter for voters’ democratic behavior and beliefs?
The role of pledges in citizens’ democratic behavior and beliefs is, surprisingly, virtually unexplored. This project’s ambition is therefore to create a new research agenda that redefines how political scientists think about the link between parties and voters. The project not only advances the research frontier by introducing a new, crucial phenomenon for political scientists to study; it also breaks new ground because it provides original theoretical and methodological tools for this new research agenda.
The key empirical contribution of this project is to collect two path-breaking datasets in the United States, France, and Norway that produce an unbiased estimate of voters’ awareness and use of pledges. The first consists of a set of innovative panel surveys with embedded conjoint experiments conducted both before and after national elections. The second dataset codes all pledges; whether or not they are broken; and how the mass media report on them.
This project is unique in its scientific ambition: It studies the core mechanism of representative democracy as it happens in real time, and does so in several countries. If successful, we will have much firmer knowledge about how voters select parties that best represent them and sanction those that betray their trust – and what this all implies for people’s trust in democracy.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantInstitución de acogida
8000 Aarhus C
Dinamarca