Using an original data set of 200,000 parliamentary candidates in nine European democracies as “big data”, we analyse the evolution of parties and party systems. Our research was initially funded as part of the FP7 ANTICORRP project and is now funded by University College London and Leibniz University Hannover.
Our publications
- Party People: Electoral Candidates and Party Evolution, Oxford University Press, forthcoming October 2023.
- Candidate Turnover and Party Policy Change
- Party entry, exit and candidate turnover
- Party Congruence and Novelty: A New Approach to Measuring Party and Party System Change. Party Politics, Vol 25, Issue 6, 2019.
- Candidate Turnover as a Measure of Party Change
- Renomination or Rejuvenation: Corruption and candidate turnover in Central and Eastern Europe
- Candidate Turnover and Party System Change in Central and Eastern Europe
Our data
We have compiled a comprehensive data set on electoral candidates in 11 Central and Eastern European democracies during the last 25 years (over 250,000 records) and are in the process of extending it to other democracies. For managing and analysing the data set, we have developed extensive code in R that includes innovative elements of machine learning. The data set will be publicly available shortly.