Understanding voters, parties, and elites (and how they influence policy-making) is crucial to monitoring the functioning of electoral democracy in modern societies. The proposed research infrastructure for Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) in Europe aims to:
The aim of MEDem is to establish, operate and develop a pan-European distributed research infrastructure of data-collection centres and national nodes in order to provide resources, facilities and support for high quality research regarding all stages of the democratic electoral process in Europe. MEDem will grant European researchers effective access to its resources and Common Services that include a centrally organized data management and dissemination service, and provide scientific, technical and ethical expertise.
Well-functioning elections lie at the foundation of modern liberal democracies as they provide for citizen representation in the executive and legislative branches of power. To understand in depth how citizens, elites, parliaments,governments and media interact and relate to each other in contemporary electoral competition is therefore central for the understanding of modern societies. Democracies face a number of very evident challenges. The future of the EU itself is put into question by popular sentiment as manifested in referendum and election outcomes. Fifty years of studying voting behavior has taught us much about voters’ party choices, but recent electoral surprises seem to have been associated especially with new departures in media usage and with unconventional candidacies that affect the context within which elections take place. Such matters cannot be studied from within the confines of individual countries — confines that limit the extent to which context can vary. The proposed infrastructure will provide the means to address such questions, three examples of which are: (a) when do citizens believe “fake news” and when not? (b) When do changing economic conditions affect support for political parties? (c) When can party leaders hope to influence voters and when do they rather need to bow to voter demands? To answer these questions and others like them takes sufficient examples of different media outlets, different economic conditions and different party leaders. A single country does not supply this need. Also, European democracies today are interrelated and inter-dependent and must be researched accordingly. To provide adequate variance in the character of parties and candidates, and in how the media covers their activities and pronouncements, data manifestly needs to be made available on multiple elections covering as many countries as possible over as long a time-span as possible.
Potentially suitable data already exist, not only regarding voters but also regarding parties, their candidates and manifestos, and (even if more sporadically) the media that reports on them. The proposed research infrastructure for Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) would release the potential currently locked away from view by the idiosyncrasies of country- and topic-specific data collection and coding conventions. MEDem will bring together scattered infrastructures, research initiatives, centres, and projects across Europe under one umbrella to facilitate and stimulate innovation in the study of electoral democracy. It will situate existing and future voting data within broader social and dynamic contexts of elite, party, and government activities as well as those of the media in its broadest sense, over the passage of time. In this way it will enhance research capacity for monitoring the legitimacy and well-functioning of dynamic electoral processes – topics of interest to scholars well beyond political science, including those in economics, sociology and media studies. Such topics have recently come to the fore because of the strong performance of populist parties promoting illiberal political ideas. Because not all countries have seen similar developments, MEDem data might even permit scholars to devise political and institutional correctives for poor democratic performance. The importance of these questions is widely understood, as is the need for appropriate data in order to address them. Given this context, the impact of the proposed infrastructure will be profound. See the Preface to the eBook An Audit of Democracy in the European Union and see the contents of that book for examples of the sort of research that can be conducted with a database such as the one proposed.The original scientific case for the infrastructure that we propose was made in the 2007 PIREDEU (see Background) application for FP7 funding and found persuasive. In the light of recent political developments in Europe and elsewhere, that case can only have been strengthened.
- In 2004, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) was given the mandate by the Council of the European Union to develop a European Strategic Roadmap for Research Infrastructure. The aims were to describe the scientific infrastructural needs for the next 10 to 20 years. In 2006, ESFRI published its report, the “European Roadmap for Research Infrastructure”, followed by updates in 2008, 2010 and 2016. The ESFRI Roadmap identifies infrastructures in all fields which are vital for research and which should be realised on a European level.
- In 2007 an Infrastructure Design Study was funded by the EU’s FP7 Programme (for the period February 1, 2008 - January 31, 2011) with the goal of Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in Europe (PIREDEU). That study delivered its Final Report in 2011, detailing the design for an infrastructure to monitor electoral democracy in Europe and recommending its implementation. However, it was not possible to place this infrastructure onto the ESFRI roadmap because the roadmap had been closed.
- As a final act before disbanding, the PIREDEU design team founded a membership association to promote the eventual establishment of the PIREDEU-designed infrastructure. That association, the Consortium for European Research with Election Studies (CERES) was associated with a variety of projects that followed up on the PIREDEU design, implementing certain of that design’s components in trial or interim fashion, amounting to most of a preparatory phase for the proposed infrastructure. With the re-opening of the ESFRI Roadmap CERES established a Task Force to oversee the process of obtaining roadmap status for the PIREDEU-designed infrastructure, now called Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem). Members were elected by unanimity of delegates at a CERES Special Meeting of 28 election study PIs from 26 countries.
- The aim of MEDem is to establish, operate and develop a pan-European distributed research infrastructure of data-collection centres and national nodes in order to provide resources, facilities and support for high quality research regarding all stages of the democratic electoral process in Europe. MEDem will grant European researchers effective access to its resources and Common Services that include a centrally organized data management and dissemination service, and provide scientific, technical and ethical expertise.
- Once admitted to the Roadmap, MEDem will enter an interim phase directed at completing preparations for its implementation phase, including the setting up of a legal framework, access conditions and a sustainable financial plan to operate it.
Consortium for European Research with Election Studies
(CERES)
European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures
(ESFRI)
Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union
(PIREDEU)
MEDem data components (Annex A)
MEDem organization chart (Annex B)
MEDem Financial plan (Annex D)
MEDem Distributed service (Annex E)
MEDem Interim and implementation (Annex F)
