Descrizione del progetto
Impegnarsi per servire? Esaminare il modo in cui le promesse elettorali plasmano le preferenze politiche
Tra le caratteristiche fondamentali della democrazia rappresentativa figura la promessa fatta in campagna elettorale, il cosiddetto impegno. Viene formulato da un candidato o da un partito politico ed è basato su questioni e temi di politica rilevanti. Il progetto PLEDGEDEM, finanziato dall’UE, chiarirà il legame tra i politici e le loro campagne, gli elettori e il ruolo dei media. Esaminerà l’importanza degli impegni su scelte e responsabilità elettorali ed è volto a creare una nuova agenda di ricerca che ridefinirà il modo in cui gli scienziati considerano il legame tra partiti ed elettori. Il lavoro del progetto migliorerà le conoscenze sul modo in cui gli elettori scelgono i partiti e su come agiscono nei confronti di chi tradisce la loro fiducia.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
8000 Aarhus C
Danimarca