Projects
EPOCA (Corruption and Economic Crisis)
Recent empirical research confirms a link between corruption and political support, but evidence seems to suggest that citizens do not always punish incumbents electorally when corruption is made salient. There seems to be a propensity among the public to trade off ethical standards for economic wellbeing. The project’s main hypothesis is that in contexts of economic crisis, citizens become particularly sensitive to corruption, especially that affecting political actors, institutions, and processes. The general objective of this study is to analyse, using both observational and experimental data, how economic outcomes, real and perceived, can impact upon citizens’ ethical standards. I’m co-principal investigator in this project, together with Luís de Sousa.
PASSDA (Production and Archive of Social Science Data)
PASSDA is a research infrastructure aiming at the production, analysis and archiving of data in the context of national and international projects in the domain of the social sciences. PASSDA is the national node of the European Social Survey (ESS-ERIC), of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA, through APIS, the Portuguese Archive of Social Information), and of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES, through the Portuguese Election Study). PASSDA is included in the Portuguese Roadmap of Research Infrastructures of strategic relevance for 2014-2020 promoted by FCT-Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, and is a consortium composed by ICS-ULisboa, CES-UC ISCTE – IUL, ISCSP-ULisboa, ISEG-ULisboa, CIES/ISCTE-IUL, DINÂMIA/ISCTE-IUL, CIS/ISCTE-IUL CSG/ISEG, REM, CAPP-ISCSP-ULisboa, and CIEG/ISCSP-ULisboa. I am currently the director of this consortium.
POPSTAR (Public Opinion and Sentiment Tracking, Analysis, and Research)
POPSTAR was a collaborative research initiative by ICS-UL, INESC-ID, FEUP and NIPE-UM that explored web-based conventional and social media with text mining and generates indicators of both frequency and polarity (positivity/negativity) of mentions to political actors, the economy, and economic policies across sources, types of sources, and across time. The project was funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation. Our goal was to analyze the relationship between survey/poll-based indicators of public opinion and indicators of salience and polarity of opinion in web-based conventional and social media texts.
POP (Public Opinion Portal)
POP (Public Opinion Portugal) is a project of the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation that allows the visualization of aggregate survey data from the Eurobarometer, the European Social Survey, and the European Values Study. Nearly 100 indicators, divided into seven major themes (Economy, Family, Politics, Religion, Self, Social Groups, and Work) are available, with data going back to the 1980s. I was the main coordinator of that project, with the collaboration of Alice Ramos and Cícero Pereira.
CEP: Portuguese Voting Behavior
I’m currently one of the executive coordinators of CEP, a research program established at the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Lisbon aimed at studying electoral behavior and political attitudes. Started in 2001, it has by now conducted five post-electoral large-scale surveys (following the 2002, 2005, 2009, and 2011 legislative elections and the 2006 presidential election), as well as two media studies during the 2005 and 2006 campaigns. Check the website, where you can browse the existing publications, find out out to obtain data and check the press coverage of our activities.
ESS: European Social Survey – Round 6
I was part of a five-member team, led by Hanspeter Kriesi, that has designed a new module for ESS – round 6 – dealing with Europeans’ understandings and evaluations of democracy. For more information about the proposed module click here. The European Social Survey is a social survey designed to chart and explain the interaction between Europe’s changing institutions and the attitudes, beliefs and behavior patterns of its populations. A repeat cross-sectional survey, it has been funded through the European Commission’s Framework Programmes, the European Science Foundation and national funding bodies in each country.
PIREDEU
A three-year design-study funded by the European Union under its 7th Framework Programme and co-ordinated by the Robert Schumann Center of the European University Institute. It aimed at providing an infrastructure for research on electoral democracy in the EU. With its origins in the European Election Studies that have been conducted since 1979, it encompassed several pilot studies, including a voter survey, a candidate survey, a study of party manifestos, a media study and the collection of socio-political, institutional and economic contextual data. I was a member of PIREDEU’s Steering Committee and ICS-UL was one of the Consortium Partners.
IntUne
IntUne stands for Integrated and United, a four-year Integrated Project funded by the European Union under its 6th Framework Programme and co-ordinated by the University of Siena. It focused on European Citizenship and its main dimensions: Citizenship, Representation and Scope of Government. InTune has collected and analyzed empirical data on mass and political and bureaucratic elites’ attitudes, as well as media content and deliberative polling results, in seventeen European Union member and candidate countries. Check InTune’s website and the IntUne series at Oxford University Press.
CSES
CSES stands for Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the largest collaborative program of research among election study teams accross the world. Participating countries include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies. The resulting data are deposited along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables. The studies are then merged into a single, free, public dataset for use in comparative study and cross-level analysis. You can also analyze the CSES data online. ICS-UL has been using the CSES modules in the Portuguese Election Study since 2002. I was a member of CSES’s modules 4 and 5 planning committee.
CNEP
CNEP stands for Comparative National Elections Project, a collaborative program of research on elections whose main theoretical agenda is a focus on the processes of intermediation through which citizens receive information about policies, parties, candidates, and politics in general during the course of election campaigns, using survey data from a very diverse set of countries, including a large number of new democracies in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Check CNEP’s website. You can download the survey and macro data pertaining to the early phases of the project.
Portuguese Eurobarometer Reports
Since 2002, the delegation of European Commission in Portugal (as in all other member states) has commissioned nationally focused reports on the results of the Standard Eurobarometer. An ICS-UL based team, composed by myself, Marina Costa Lobo, Manuel Villaverde Cabral, José Pereira, Ana Espírito Santo, Diogo Moreira and Carlos Jalali has produced 13 of those reports ever since. You can download them at the Eurobarometer webpage.
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