Politics of Aedification, Sensation and Ruination at the Brussels Wiertz Museum

This paper seeks to explain why party candidates and their party leadership have congruent policy positions or not. Despite its importance as a way through which parties are able to behave as a unitary actor, this congruence has never been studied as a dependent variable. We seek to fill this void in the literature. Our results suggest that leadership-candidate congruence comes about through two mechanisms: selection and learning. With selection, the party leadership aims to get those candidates elected whose policy preferences are congruent with the party line. Learning occurs through the process of socialization in which candidates assume the views of the party they work and candidate for as their own under. This happens under the pressure of cognitive dissonance. If a candidate learns about the position of the leadership and notices that they are incongruent, they may feel discomfort and change their opinion to be congruent with the party

The Politics of Covid-19 Vaccination Hesitancy in Southeastern Europe.

peer reviewedThe execution of Covid-19 vaccination drives in former Yugoslavia's successor states has been disappointing. The rapidly evolving literature on the Covid-19 pandemic suggests the levels of support for vaccination are correlated with education, trust in public-health institutions, and exposure to the negative economic and health effects of the pandemic. The explanations of the political foundations of vaccination hesitancy, however, need better empirical grounding. We shed light on this subject by analyzing the results of a survey conducted on more than six thousand respondents from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia, as well as a combination of public-health, economic, and sociodemographic data across more than five hundred municipalities in Croatia. Most notably, we find the political sources of vaccination hesitancy to be strongly related to people's support for the ideas of political parties committed to nationalist populism

SRBCorp: Corpus of Parliamentary Debates in Serbia

The repository contains a cleaned and pre-processed corpus of parliamentary debates from the National Assembly of Serbia. The corpus is accompanied by the metadata on elected representatives and their political parties. It covers the period of 1997-2020 (eight terms) and counts over 300 thousand speeches.1.1.

Choosing Women in Postwar Elections: Exposure to War Violence, Ideology, and Voters’ Gender Bias

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies

ELWar Croatian and Serbian 2020 Election Survey

The repository contains the cleaned and labelled data, the codebook, and the sample questionnaire of the 2020 ELWar public opinion survey conducted in two Southeast European countries: Croatia and Serbia. This survey captures the party preferences of respondents in the 2020 elections, as well as their experiences during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

ELWar COVID-19 Public Opinion Survey – 2020 Round

The repository contains the cleaned and labelled data, the codebook, and the sample questionnaire of a 2020 public opinion survey conducted in six Southeast European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. This survey captures the experiences and political attitudes of people during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also focuses on the attitudes toward vaccine policies and efforts to mitigate the economic consequences of the crisis

Consolidated democracy advantage: political instability and sovereign spreads in the EU

We expose the way the market evaluates internal political risk and instability in democratic polities by analysing the determinants of sovereign spreads of EU member states over the course of the past two decades. Our analysis builds on the “democratic advantage” argument which suggests democracies enjoy preferential treatment on the international market of sovereign debt because of their better ability to make credible commitments. We suggest that, when it comes to the market’s evaluation of internal political instability and risk in democratic polities, there actually exists a “consolidated democracy advantage”. In times of political instability, older and more consolidated democracies pay less of a premium on their debt than their younger and less consolidated counterparts. In other words, the market indeed views the commitment of consolidated democracies with long track records of democratic competition and survival as something qualitatively diferent than the commitment of new democracies with short track records

ELWar COVID-19 Public Opinion Survey – 2021 Round

The dataset 2021 ELWar COVID-19 Public Opinion Survey contains the data from the 2021 ELWar public opinion survey conducted in seven Southeast European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. This survey captures the experiences and political attitudes of people during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also focuses on the attitudes toward vaccine policies and efforts to mitigate the economic consequences of the crisis

ELWar Public Opinion Survey – 2018 Round

The repository contains the cleaned and labelled data, the codebook, and the sample questionnaire of a 2018 public opinion survey conducted in six Southeast European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. This survey captures the experiences of respondents and people close to them during the wars that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and how they look back on these conflicts. In addition, the data contains people’s political views on issues such as nationalism, patriotism, economic policy, and interethnic relations. Finally, the survey measures the political behavior of participants, such as their electoral choices, news and media consumption, and the forms of political participation they engage in

BiHCorp: Corpus of Parliamentary Debates in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The repository contains a cleaned and pre-processed corpus of parliamentary debates from the Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The corpus is accompanied by the metadata on elected representatives and their political parties. It covers the period of 1998-2018 (six complete terms) and counts over 127 thousand speeches.1.1.