Science cluster
Summary
In today’s democracies, the relationship between political parties and voters plays a critical role in shaping political outcomes. However, research on this interaction, including party responsiveness to voter preferences, is often hampered by fragmented and non-FAIR datasets, which are not maintained and harmonised in the long-term. The HarDIS project – Harmony in the Democratic Ideological Space – aims to create a community-based, sustainable, scalable, and FAIR linkage key database. HarDIS will enhance the integration of new party and voter data into the Party Facts platform. It will also harmonise data, streamlining access for researchers and ensuring long-term collaboration in democracy studies. The project also contributes to the long-term sustainability of such databases by aligning with the European Research Infrastructure (RI) Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem).
Challenge
Open Science service
In contemporary democracies, understanding the relationship between political parties and voters is paramount, but long-term research on this interaction is hindered by the fragmented and short-lived nature of many data harmonisation projects. While initiatives such as Party Facts, True European Voter, OnBound, QuestionLink, or the Survey Data Recycling Project have made significant strides, their sustainability is often compromised by the lack of ongoing funding and institutional support, leading to the deterioration of valuable datasets over time.
Solution
HarDIS main objective is to make linking and harmonisation efforts FAIR and sustainable for the research community as a whole. To do so, HarDIS will create a scalable and community-driven framework for sustainable linkage key databases. The project will reach out to providers of other community-based data projects and to Party Facts’ contributors to systematically analyse their experiences and needs, improve Party Facts' collaboration tool and provide a general framework for community-based linkage key databases. The project will also integrate new data into Party Facts, extending its scope and depth substantially. Data on the position of parties included in Party Facts and their voters will be harmonised.
Scientific Impact
HarDIS will significantly reduce the burden of data preparation for democracy researchers, allowing them to focus on their core analyses. Its scalable and sustainable model for linkage key databases will enhance long-term collaboration and data reuse in the Social Sciences. Additionally, HarDIS’ harmonisation of political party and voter data will create a blueprint for similar efforts in other research fields, promoting broader harmonisation and advancing the study of political representation, party competition, and public opinion. The project also plans to integrate HarDIS' framework for collaborative linkage key databases into the MEDem RI, and in the SSH Open Marketplace.
Principal investigator
Lea Kaftan is a postdoctoral researcher at GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany. Her research addresses questions surrounding electoral politics, public opinion, and historical data, with a focus on democratic attitudes, party positions, and voter perceptions of parties. She has become an expert in survey experiments and quantitative text analysis. She received her PhD from the University of Cologne in 2022 and has previously worked at Witten/Herdecke University.
