Mixed methods for analysing what political parties promise to voters during election campaigns

Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbanken Jubileumsfond):
https://www.rj.se/en/

For democracy to function effectively, political parties must offer meaningful choices to voters during election campaigns. However, as parties’ communication with voters is becoming increasingly fragmented, targeted and direct, it is becoming impossible for citizens to keep track of what different parties are promising. These new styles of campaigning are also challenging established methods for studying parties’ campaign promises. This project aims to develop innovative new methods that for the first time will enable researchers to examine the qualitative content of what parties promise in the large quantity of text and speech in election campaigns. The project includes leaders of the world’s largest research group devoted to the qualitative analysis of parties’ campaign promises. It also includes researchers who have developed new and widely used methods for the quantitative analysis of political texts, which detect patterns among words and ideas in large amounts of text. Progress in this field has been stifled by limited dialogue among the proponents of different qualitative and quantitative methods. This project will examine the strengths, limitations and theoretical implications of the full range of methods used in this field. The new methods that we will develop aim to combine they strengths of different approaches. These existing and new methods are highly relevant to the analysis of text and speech in a wide range of social science fields.