Prewar Public Discourse: Letters to Politika, Belgrade, 1988–1991

We studied prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content and sentiment of more than 4,000 letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade broadsheet Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during the three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combined lexicon-based tools of automated topic and sentiment analysis with data on the sociodemographic characteristics of the letter writers and their localities. The results of our analysis show the importance of the politicisation of a history of violence in shaping public discourse in the run-up to war

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

Modelling the Legacies of War Violence: Voters, Parties, Communities

Wars are extreme events with profound social consequences. Political science, however, has a limited grasp of their impact on the nature and content of political competition which follows in their wake. That is partly the case due to a lack of conceptual clarity when it comes to capturing the effects of war with reliable data. This article systematises and evaluates the attempts at modelling the consequences of war in political science research which relies on quantitative methods. Our discussion is organised around three levels of analysis: individual level of voters, institutional level of political parties, and the aggregate level of communities. We devote particular attention to modelling the legacies of the most recent wars in Southeast Europe, and we offer our view of which efforts have the best potential to help set the foundations of a promising research programme

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

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.

CROCorp: Corpus of Parliamentary Debates in Croatia. v1.1.1 (2003-2020)

The repository contains a cleaned and pre-processed corpus of parliamentary debates from the Croatian Parliament (Sabor). The corpus is accompanied by the metadata on elected representatives and their political parties. It covers the period of 2003-2020 (five complete terms) and counts over 500 thousand speeches.1.1.

Health Versus Wealth During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Saving Lives or Saving the Economy?

Efforts to combat the COVID-19 crisis were characterized by a difficult trade-off: the stringency of the lockdowns decreased the spread of the virus, but amplified the damage to the economy. In this study, we analyze public attitudes toward this trade-off on the basis of a survey and survey-embedded experiment of more than seven thousand respondents from Southeast Europe, collected in April and May 2020. The results show that public opinion generally favored saving lives even at a steep economic cost. However, the willingness to trade lives for the economy was greater when the heterogeneous health and economic consequences of lockdown policies for the young and the elderly were emphasized. Free market views also make people more acceptant of higher casualties, as do fears that the instituted measures will lead to a permanent expansion of government control over society

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.

ELWar Mapdat

Mapdat is the online platform of the project ELWar (Electoral Legacies of War) which is funded by the ERC and is hosted by the Institute of Political Science at the University of Luxembourg. The platform organises collected publicly available data in geographic space and over time. The primary purpose of the platform is to visually present the evolution of economic, social, and political development in Southeast Europe over the past five decades with special reference to the legacies and effects of war violence

Understanding Electoral Violence through Complex Textual Data: OSCE Monitoring Missions in Different Contexts

The paper analyses more than 20 years of evidence on electoral violence as reported by OSCE monitoring mission reports. It identifies prevailing trends of electoral violence in the OSCE participating states in order to better understand how the phenomenon is understood and framed by leading international monitoring organizations in the region. The analysis utilizes a unique approach based on automated content analysis employing counting algorithms and latent semantic indexing. The results of the analysis show how electoral violence differs throughout the region while highlighting the qualitative variations in regional patterns of the reported incidents of election-related violence