Theme: The State of the Art in Comparative Electoral Research

An activity of project “The True European Voter” (COST Action IS0806)

http://www.true-european-voter.eu/

Methods Working Group 

University of National and World Economy, Sofia (Bulgaria), December 1-3 2011

 Academic convenors:

Cees van der Eijk (University of Nottingham & Amsterdam School of Communication Research)

Anne Jadot (University of Nancy & CEPEL)

Eftichia Teperoglou (Mannheim Centre for European Social Research-MZES, University of Mannheim)

Local Conference organizers:

Mihail Mirchev and Katia Mihailova (University of National and World Economy, Sofia)

We invite papers for a conference to be held in Sofia in December 2011.

The focus of the conference is on comparative electoral research, and we seek to recruit original papers that exploit systematic empirical research across one or more of the following dimensions of comparison: across systems (such as countries, or sub-national units), across time (short term, as when studying campaign dynamics, or long term, spanning multiple electoral cycles), across levels of government (local, regional, national and transnational).

We are particularly interested in papers addressing the following topics:

- The foundations of electoral choices (and how these  vary over contexts)

- The electoral connection between voters and parties

- The specific contributions of comparative research towards a unified theory of elections

- The methodological challenges concerning data collection and comparative analysis (and how to overcome these)

- Increasing the analytical value of comparative electoral data

We also welcome empirical contributions that link the electoral process to representation, accountability, and legitimacy, or any other original contributions to comparative electoral research.

A more extensive call for papers and a submission form can be found on http://true-european-voter.eu/eccer

Paper proposals (using the submission form) should be sent by September 8th to tev.eccer@gmail.com. Proposals should contain a title and an abstract (up to 400 words), with concise information about research questions, theoretical approach, study design, and expected results.

Authors will be notified by September 17th. Contributions to travel and accommodation costs are available for a limited number of paper givers (on the basis of an accepted proposal and complementing other funding). Authors seeking such support will be notified by September 26th.