Torbjörn Bergman, Umeå University

2007-2012

The purpose of this project (ERD) was to establish an infrastructure that would facilitate research on how citizens/voters are represented through political parties and democratic institutions. The two central project nodes have been Umeå University and the Linnaeus University.

At the outset, one of the two concrete goals was to build the best data set available on European governments, parliaments and political parties. Others may judge our efforts, but we believe that we have actually come close to meeting this goal. The other ambition was that this huge data collection undertaking was not supposed to last for only three years and then cease to exist. We can also report success in this regard. We have ensured that the Data Archive effort will continue for the foreseeable future. We will say more about this below.

Let us note that the original request for funding was cut. This has meant that we have not been able to pursue the "voter" link as much as we had hoped to, but the project been successful in all other respects. Our European Representative Democracy Data Archive is the main output of the project. It has now been published on-line with free and open access for all interested at www.erdda.se

One of our archive's major contributions to the field is its early open access release. The same day that we published the Data Archive on-line (March 31, 2012), we submitted our first article to a scientific journal. Thus, in contrast to almost all other available data archives - and with the exception of a few working papers primarily designed to test data quality and consistency - we (the project researchers) have not published on the data ourselves. This is in contrast to most other database efforts, which usually impose a one or two year moratorium on the release of the data to the general public. Precisely because this has been a genuine intra-structure project, we offer our data to the scholarly community before we have published extensively on it.

The data archive consists of government (cabinet), parliament and political party data for 29 European democracies in post-WWII Europe. For each country, it includes data for the cabinets that have formed since the introduction of the current democratic regime of parliamentary democracy (for Cyprus representative democracy). The dataset covers all cabinets that formed before or on December 31 2010 (we include data available up through November 2011). Altogether, a total of 640 cabinets--coalitions, single party and non-partisan--are included.

Given the above criteria, data for Greece, Portugal and Spain have been collected since their democratizations in the 1970s, while data on France is limited to the Fifth Republic that began in 1959. Regarding new member states of the European Union from Central Eastern Europe (CEE), as well as Malta and Cyprus, data exists only for the period after the democratization of the region (starting with the first democratically elected parliament).

Up to 1 January 1999, the Comparative Parliamentary Democracy (CPD) data archive - also an effort that was sponsored by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond - is the main data source for the 17 Western European (WE) countries (1-17). This CPD data set has now been deposited at the Swedish National Data Service (Svensk nationell datatjänst) archive in Gothenburg. However, a few of these variables have been recorded or re-calculated in a different way in the new dataset. This means that although we indicate these variables' CPD names in the new codebook, there is not a 100% correspondence between all of the data in the European Representative Democracy (ERD) dataset and the CPD data. Nevertheless, most of the data from WE-17 prior to 1999 can also be accessed using the CPD link on our homepage (www.erdda.se). In the case of variables from CPD which have been completely revised, we note this in the codebook. Likewise, all data after 1999 are from our own data collection. The same is true for all countries (18-29) that were not part of the CPD Data Archive.

Also novel to this project is that we have assembled a source file indicating the source of each individual data point. In that process, we have checked multiple sources for each data point before deciding on the coding content. The sources for the data are listed in a full reference list at the end of the Reference file (also at www.erdda.se). The reference file is constructed as a mirror image of the data file, the difference being that instead of a data entry in each cell, we have entered the sources used when calculating or coding that data. This enables the user to identify the references used for each data entry. Further details, variable definitions and methods can also be found in the codebook and in the Notes on coding principles. All documents are available online.

Returning to the future of the ERD Data Archive, Bergman, the principal investigator, has ensured continued funding through 2014 from the Östersjöstiftelsen, for a project on Governments in Europe - Bringing in the Baltic and East Central European Democracies. In particular, the new data collection project examines and gathers information on two aspects of government formation and termination in the region that have not yet been the subject of scholarly inquiry. One of these is coalition governance. At present, knowledge about this aspect of national politics in this region is very scarce, both in the international literature and (according to our country experts) in the national languages of the countries. We are particularly interested in developing an understanding of the conflict resolution mechanisms that government parties try to use to enforce and maintain their coalitions.

Second, while there is a body literature about how long governments typically stay in power, very little is known about the specific reasons as to why they terminate. Research about these topics requires both systematic data collection and qualitative case studies that are context sensitive and written by scholars with a high degree of insight into the politics of each country. Because the project asks both new and long-standing questions about government formation and stability in a region where such questions have been under-studied, it will also inform the entire research tradition that is based on theories of coalition formation.

This new Södertörn project is part of an international research collaboration aimed at improving our understanding of what goes on inside European governments and parliaments. In the project, we will put much time and effort into establishing firm and precise information about governments, political parties and parliaments in the CEE region. In a parallel project, a research team led by Professor Wolfgang C. Müller at the University of Vienna is preparing an in-depth analysis of the many crucial aspects of coalition governance in Central Eastern Europe that remain to be researched. This includes coalition agreements and how coalition management mechanisms are designed and maintained, as well as when and how they actually work. If this collaboration is successful and sufficient funds are granted, we will also aim to include all of the EU member states in a study of representative democracy in the new Europe.

A second cooperative project has been secured by one of our project participants, Johan Hellström. He has won a large grant from the Marianne and Marcus Wallenbergs Foundation for the project Representative Democracy in Europe. This is a five year project designed to research questions about the link between voter opinions and representative politics. Hellström is the principal investigator and Bergman is a contributor to this project. As a result of close collaboration with the European Representative Democracy Data Archive (www.erdda.se) discussed here, this new project will have access to this new and comprehensive data source on governments, parliaments, party systems and institutions in Western- and Central and Eastern Europe. By combining our data with established data sources on the attitudes and values systems of voters, this project makes possible unique research on representative democracy in Western and Eastern Europe.

The main focus of the Hellström project is the link between voters and elected politicians. For this purpose, this project aims at combining high-quality comparative data on institutions, governments, political parties and citizens in order to contextualize surveys of individual citizens and provide a foundation for multilevel analysis of modern politics, including the interaction of citizen opinions and institutional factors. This second spin-off project will also focus on Europe, thus enabling us to develop greater precision and inter-cultural commensurability than is possible with worldwide studies over very different political regimes.