Research question/goal:

This project investigates the trade-offs between conflict and cooperation from both the parties’ and the voters’ perspectives. I will first study how changes in public opinion inputs—through polls and subnational electoral results—affect parties’ interactions in parliament. I will then turn to the effects of said interactions on voters’ attitudes toward the opposition parties as well as the democratic system as a whole.

I will create a broad comparative dataset combining information from official sources and existing datasets on legislative votes, parliamentary speeches, electoral results, and polling data for all parties in the studied parliaments. This dataset will be combined with CSES, ESS, and Eurobarometer survey data. Finally, a cross-national survey experiment will be conducted to identify the micro-mechanisms underlying voters’ responses to party activity.

Current stage:

The project’s primary data collection and harmonisation has been finalised with a 12-country dataset that combines parliamentary votes and election polls. We are now working on a sentiment analysis of these countries’ parliamentary speeches. Additionally, we are compiling a dataset of the media coverage of government–opposition interactions in those countries. In terms of output, four working papers are at different stages of preparation for submission.