Causes and Consequences of Ideological Polarization
Research question/goal:
The main goal of the project is to analyze electoral democracy amongst European countries. This means to study the effective working of elections in a comparative perspective, that is to study the effects of social and political environment on electoral. This also means to integrate and harmonize the diverse data-sets of national election studies, in order to obtain a wide integrated data source for further research.
Current stage:
The topic of the dissertation has been sub-divided into three sub-themes. One of those three focuses on the relationship between ideological polarisation and rivalling theories of issue voting. More in particular, it is argued in a conference paper that rising ideological polarisation increases the utility of the directional model of issue voting. Under condition of high polarisation, the directional model is a better predictor of vote choices than the smallest distance model.In the Eight Research Programme the project moved to "Marie Curie Initial Training Network in Electoral Democracy (ELECDEM)"
