Issues, Values, Ideology and Party Choice
This report presents the work package 2 entitled “Issues, Values, Ideology and Party Choice”. This work package examines how left/right ideology and issues affect electoral processes in contemporary Europe. It focuses on the process of electoral choice and its outcome, namely political representation. This project takes a comparative cross-national approach by analysing and comparing party support and representation in 27 countries of the European Union, with particular attention to the differences between established democracies of Western Europe and consolidating democracies of East Central Europe. It employs two surveys from the PIREDEU network (“Providing an Infrastructure for Research on Electoral Democracy in the European Union”), namely the European Election Study 2009 and the European Parliament Election Candidate Survey 2009. The findings of this project explain differences between Western European and East Central European voters in how left/right ideology and issues determine party support, show differences across generations from the West and the East with regard to how long- and short-term factors affect party support as well as offer insights into the quality of representation across established and consolidating democracies. This report starts with an executive summary, then it outlines how work package 2 contributes to the overall goals of the ELECDEM network and subsequently evaluates the training within the ELECDEM network and the data employed in this project. The full report consists of the PhD thesis and encompasses introduction, four chapters forming separate articles and conclusions.
Download the full report: WP02_Agnieszka Walczak_ESR Final Report (PDF 1,481KB)