O Social Groups, Where Art Thou? A cross-national and longitudinal analysis of the place of social groups at the core of the party-voter representative linkage

The party-voter representative linkage is central to modern democracies.

Because political parties, once in office, steer fiscal and social policies, the social groups they claim to represent in their group appeals matter for distributing tangible public goods and specially the equitable treatment of minority groups by the government.

While many party politics studies are devoted to parties’ policy appeals and their role in political representation, group appeals have received little attention thus far, leaving a theoretical and empirical gap.

Recent studies begin to address this oversight but these works are still few and limited in scope, using either longitudinal, single-country data, or cross-national, time-limited data.

Combining insights from political, communication, and computational linguistics, GAPREP will build a new software library (SL) for the computational analysis of political texts (R package).

The SL will then be used to analyse group appeals in more than 950 election manifestos in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the UK between 1949-2022, building a new and publicly available dataset.

Together with cross-national historical survey data on voters’ demographics and party preferences from the 1980s onwards (given available data), advanced statistical modelling will reveal how representative of social groups parties have been over the past 40-years.

Pushing scholarship on the party-voter linkage still further, the project will also use a unique vignette survey experiment to study the underlying mechanism of this linkage by examining voters’ reactions to parties’ group appeals. Combining these efforts, findings will illuminate social groups' access to power, and social and political equality.

Offering a new perspective on the party-voter linkage, the project aims to positively contribute to voters’ contemporary low levels of political trust, which is central to the healthy functioning of modern liberal democracies.