📝 Submit your paper proposal here: ecpr.eu/MyEcpr/Forms...

💬 Send questions to: fabian.habersack@uibk.ac.at

📢 Please share with interested colleagues

#ecprjs26 #partycompetition #politicalcommunication #ambiguity #blurring #democracy #representation

We particularly invite qualitative and quantitative empirical work, survey experiments and computational text analyses that speak to the multidimensionality of party policy ambiguity and/or its consequences for citizen perceptions and support for democracy.

We focus on the varied functions ambiguity fulfills on the party side—from evading contentious issues to actually signaling competence—as well as how citizens interpret its origins, and how those interpretations shape trust, accountability perceptions, and support for democracy.

Blurring in party communication has become increasingly visible, even as political actors appeal to clarity, expertise, and evidence-based decision-making (particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic). Our workshop revisits ambiguity as a central but under-theorized feature of party competition.

I’m also collecting resources more broadly, including lists of datasets and corpora of text and other content data that lend themselves to empirical research. Hoping to share it all on #GitHub after the term in case it’s useful to others! 💡📊📚

This also extends to environmental policy. 😉

doi.org/10.1080/0964...