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:

Data collection has been completed. We are currently working on improving our parliamentary speech analysis, moving from dictionary-based sentiment analysis to training an LLM classifier. In terms of output, we have three manuscripts under review and three working papers in progress. A workshop was held in early 2026 where we presented the findings of the project to other experts and discussed ideas for future research.