WORK PACKAGE 7 – Online surveys and experiments
WP 7 description:
Work Package 7 follows RO4 and tests explicit propositions with freshly collected and custom-designed data about what policy disagreements between parties are more likely to trigger a strong response in the Romanian electorate in terms of issue attention and apparent issue voting. Building on the findings of WPs 2, 3 and 4, WP7 shall determine what policy disagreements between the parties emerged in the Romanian Parliament and the news media, and classifies these issues in terms of theoretically proposed predictors of issue voting, like issue salience, tangible and symbolic content, persistence over time, ideological anchoring in party identities, simplicity, clarity and the polarization of alternatives. Next, we design survey questions that can measure the intensity of response to the given issues in citizens‟ party evaluations among attentive citizens with widely varying policy attitudes. We shall administer the survey items to the well-established Questia.ro online panels. This gives the possibility of low-cost short surveys at any given week with an N=1,000+ wide cross-section of the Romanian online population. While these respondents, who receive financial and solidary incentives for their participation in regular online surveys, are not representative for the entire electorate, the administration of the survey and the sampling methodology are very transparent, and in our previous we found strong attentiveness to question wording and careful consideration of the responses among these respondents. Hence this low-cost device is methodologically very well suited to provide almost instantaneous tests of citizen responses to issue disagreements between the parties as they emerge in real life and actual news media content. Risks are mitigated by the availability of alternative – though more expensive and lower transparency – providers of online samples in Romania. We plan to carry out multiple but very short surveys during the three years of the project to run methodologically innovative and theoretically sharply focused experiments about what types of policy domains and issues are most likely to allow the emergence of issue voting in Romania when they actually occur in public discourse. This will allow the WP to synthesize the project findings and address in research papers the key research questions about obstacles in party platforms, legislative behavior and news media coverage to a stronger development of policy-based programmatic linkages between parties and their voters in Romania.
WP7 in 2021
Activities
1.7.1. Design and pre-register (mostly experimental) survey batteries to measure citizens’ response to specific issues and their framing
1.7.2. Administer the survey items on online citizen panels
WP 7 in 2022
Activities
2.7.1. Design and pre-register (mostly experimental) survey batteries to measure citizens’ response to specific issues and their framing
2.7.2. Administer surveys
2.7.3. Work on papers that rely on analysis of the experimental data
WP7 in 2023
Activities
3.7.1. Design and pre-register (mostly experimental) survey batteries to measure citizens’ response to specific issues and their framing
3.7.2. Administer surveys
3.7.3. Work on papers that address research questions
WP7 2024
Activities
4.7.1. Work on research papers