Objectives
Main/primary objectives
The main objective of the Action is to increase the material preconditions and the scholarly competence for analyzing variations in the effectiveness of electoral democracy in Europe across countries and over time. Preconditions will be strengthened by the identification, adaption and integration of the variety of national specific data bases on electoral behaviour. Theoretical and methodological capabilities will be improved by the provision of recurring training opportunities for young scholars as well as the organisation of regular scientific exchange of all scholars involved about the findings of the comparative analyses. The envisaged deliverables of the Action thus are of five kinds:
first, a common data set which includes the findings of National Election Studies from all the COST countries with a tradition of empirical electoral research. The current estimate is that this database will include survey information from 17 countries and some 150 individual election studies;
second, a website which provides information about the scholars participating in the Action and their contact details, access to relevant data, both directly by offering data downloads, and indirectly by linking to national and cross-national elections studies, data archives and the like, access to field questionnaires, both in national language and in English, a calendar of activities, including the schedules and agendas of training schools, conference programmes, a list of publications including a working paper series, recent conference papers not yet published otherwise, and a regularly updated bibliography of the scholars involved in the Action;
third, an annual Training School for up to 30 young scholars of electoral democracy coming from all over the COST countries;
fourth, an annual Scientific Conference where, in addition, the progress of the Action will be reviewed and discussed; and
fifth and last, a variety of peer-reviewed articles and two common books written by participating scholars and published by a good publishing house.
Secondary objectives
The secondary objectives of the Action are:
the identification and comparison of the theoretical frames in which the diverse national election studies have been carried on after World War Two;
the training of young electoral researchers on the national peculiarities of electoral behaviour;
the identification of national election studies that carry a large enough number of comparable indicators;
the documentation of relevant aspects of the fieldwork of the studies included, among them: sampling details, completion rates, and mode of survey administration;
the building of an inventory of comparable indicators across countries and over time;
the translation of respective survey questions and answering categories into English (where necessary);
the recoding of comparable indicators into a common format, plus the documentation of this process in a common codebook;
the integration of comparable variables into a common data base (including proper documentation of country origin, year of election, study and respondent identification, etc);
the identification, collection and data integration of relevant macro variables (context measures);
the analysis of the integrated dataset;
the adoption and dissemination within the electoral researchers community of up to date techniques of electoral analysis;
the training of the young electoral researchers on techniques of electoral analysis;
the building of a fully integrated theoretical frame of European electoral behaviour at national level;
the dissemination of the Actions findings in several user communities.
How will the objectives be achieved?
Accomplishing the objectives of the Action requires mainly manpower and meeting opportunities. More in particular, the following tasks will be performed:
1. identification and documentation of the relevant National Election Studies in the different COST countries;
2. translation of national questionnaires into English;
3. translation of national codebooks into English;
4. documentation of fieldwork details of the relevant studies in English;
5. recoding of national variables into a common format;
6. integration of data;
7. identification and collection of macro data;
8. building and maintaining a Website; and
9. co-ordination of the whole effort.
10. In terms of meetings, the following will be required:
11. 4 Conferences à roughly 50 participants;
12. 4 Training Schools à roughly 30 participants; and
13. up to 30 Short-Term Scientific Missions during which much of the data harmonisation and integration will be done in by young scholars under the supervision of experts. There is no special equipment applied for as the participating universities dispose of all necessary infra-structure.
User login
