The Demand Side: Voting behavior

Elections constitute crucial moments in the life of liberal democracies. Most established democracies pay tribute to the relevance of elections by specific academic research programmes that allow generating appropriate data and analyses required for the understanding of the elections and more generally the functioning of democratic politics. Such an election research programme is absent in Austria and the proposed NFN is intended as the first step towards its building-up and institutionalization. The NFN proposed here will provide a comprehensive social science analysis of the next Austrian elections and to extend the database and analysis also to previous elections. It will provide a fully integrated study of the demand side (voters) and the supply sides (political parties) of electoral competition, the media coverage of the campaign, and the dynamics the campaign unfolds. Generally, we aim at conducting analyses that match the international state-of-the-art in electoral research and with regard to some components we suggest innovations to push forward the frontiers of research. Integrating the different perspectives on elections at an early stage provides for the production of considerable additional value relative to mutually isolated work in the individual research traditions.