Where Is My Party? Determinants of Voter Agreement about the Ideological Positions of Political Parties

The aim of the project was to analyse what effects the signals sent out by the parties and their representatives in the media in the last four weeks before the election have on party competition in general and on voters’ perception of the parties in particular. One basic assumption was that with increasing diversity of the statements of party representatives before elections, the programmatic profile of the parties becomes less clear and more inconsistent, so that voters decide less on the basis of their ideological–programmatic distance between them and the party , but on the basis of other factors. In a second step, the question of how parties react to the political mood over the course of the legislative period was investigated. To this end, the press releases of the parties in two of the ten European countries studied in the project were collected and analysed. 

During the two project phases, extensive data was collected and analysed, allowing us to observe the multi-layered effects of the signals that parties send out during the election campaign and the whole legislative period on party competition and on the perception of the parties and their positions. The many facets of party communication have been and continue to be analysed in numerous articles. While the Covid-19 pandemic hampered work in the second phase of the project, a comprehensive media dataset was nevertheless compiled and press releases in two countries were collected and analysed. A workshop held in the second phase of the project brought together researchers from several countries. A planned anthology will examine the causes and consequences of negative campaigning in detail.