Liberal democracy is increasingly challenged in Europe and beyond. To better understand these challenges and to support democracies across Europe, it is important to make more transparent the activities that take place at all stages of the political process. Social scientists are nowadays in a unique position to systematically observe political developments, in particular if they fully exploit the possibilities of the vast amounts of semi-structured data and modern computational techniques. Communication is at the heart of many political processes, and understanding the current challenges to democracy inevitably must rely on a comprehensive assessment of communicative processes. Political texts produced by the media, political actors like politicians, political parties, governments, or by citizens and non-governmental organizations offer a remarkable opportunity to observe and understand social and political processes. This project sought to provide the conceptual design to build a European infrastructure for political text analysis – OPTED, the Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies — to better understand the state and dynamics of political processes in European democracies.
OPTED addresses a number of challenges that characterise political text analysis research. First, the research field of political text analysis is fragmented and therefore inefficient. This strains resources, but also impairs the quality of scientific work in terms of reproducibility and validity. Second, the research field is time and context-sensitive and language differs between usage areas and over time. Also, the European political space is multilingual and observing this space requires multilingual, non-discriminatory tools. Third, the area of text analysis has been criticised for a lack of reliability, validity, or reproducibility of research. Hence, there is a strong need towards a standardisation of processes and routines. Fourth, researchers working with political texts are touching on ethical and legal boundaries, some of which have not even been well-defined yet.
An institutionalization of the field of political text analysis through a common European infrastructure will yield a more impactful, sustainable, innovative, democratic, non-discriminatory research landscape, putting the European Research Area at the forefront of global developments in this field.
Based on a range of approaches from the project partners, the OPTED Design Study project has provided a comprehensive Conceptual Design Report which serves as a blueprint for building an operational OPTED infrastructure. Services offered through a prototype of the OPTED online platform among others include novel ways to store and retrieve data resources, a curated collection of tools and a mapping of the literature, as well as training materials. The CDR emphasizes the strong need for academic community engagement for further developing the infrastructure in line with community needs.
