Online surveys and experiments: Practical design and analysis
​12-14 March
Istanbul

Hosted by Koç University in Istanbul, this workshop held from 12 to 14 March 2015 included training on online experiments and practical design and analysis of surveys. It was also an opportunity for the Early Stage Researchers to present their research projects and receive feedback.
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Early Stage Researchers Presentations
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The Role of Trust in Technological Devices for Electoral Decision-Making

Claudia Zucca

The presentation aims at understanding the relevance of trust in technological devices for political decision-making. The circumstances under which the information reaches the user of a specific device and how this affects the decision-making process will be analysed with a special focus on the role played by the trust of the user in the device she is using. The research questions and hypotheses will be addressed by using Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) generated data and resorting to experimental designs. Despite the fact that a vast literature concerned with decision-making, technology, media effects and the role played by trust already exists, the political science literature has not agreed on a common definition of trust in relation to the use of technology. Furthermore, there is virtually no prior research on the role of trust as a moderator of the influence of the information provided by media for political decision-making, and no study addressing the measurement of trust specifically for VAAs. The original contributions of my final dissertation will therefore fill relevant gaps in the scholarly literature in this area.

Affect, sophistication, and citizen competences

Laszlo Horvath

​In the broad agenda, the first emphasis is on whether and how basic emotions contribute to political sophistication, as in the integration and differentiation of the pieces of political information in the voters' mind, with an emphasis on the use abstract principles in reasoning, such as ideology, fairness, or justice notions. The second theme to be explored is whether there is an interaction effect of cognitive sophistication with that of basic emotions', in explaining behaviour in terms of some indicators of deliberative potential: attention towards counter-attitudinal information, and opinion change. The theoretical framework distinguishes basic emotions, that is, interest, joy, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust, from more complex emotion schemas involving a great deal of cognitive reflection (Izard, 2009) and argues that basic and discreet emotions are political sophistication’s non-reflected, evaluative components. The empirical studies are dedicated to these themes and gather survey (Study 1), psycho-physiological (Study 2, through eye tracking technology), and textual evidence (Study 3) of basic emotions' diverse and differential impact.

Tapping political representation in different electoral settings using VAA-generated data

Raluca Popp​

​The aim of the paper is to inspect the relationship between institutional design settings and political representation at one hand, and the consequences of representation on European voters’ political behaviour on the other.
The aim of the paper is to inspect the relationship between institutional design settings and political representation at one hand, and the consequences of representation on European voters’ political behaviour on the other. This concentrates on the impact off different features of electoral systems on political representation conceptualized as congruence, as well as the effects of types of political parties (niche or mainstream) and individual level predictors, such as political sophistication and ideological consistency. Congruence is measured as the degree of matching of the common policy preferences of citizens and parties as indicated by the 2009 EU Profiler and 2014 EUvox Voting Advice Applications.