The ECPR General Conference, organised by the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), was held at University College Dublin from 12-15 August. Three CNSC researchers participated presenting papers that showcase some of the group’s lines of research.
The General Conference aims to promote innovative thinking to encourage the development of research spanning all sub-disciplines of political science. It is a major political science event that attracts a truly international audience.
In the panel Participatory Procedures in the Local Policy Process, in the section European Municipalities as Agents of Changes, Joel Peiruza Parga presented research on the institutionalisation of participatory budgeting (PB) policies. The article ‘Discontinuity in participatory budgeting in Catalan municipalities’, co-authored by members of the CNSC and GADE groups at the UOC, was the result of the DEMOC 2023 project. The research aims to deepen knowledge of the processes through which PB policies take root in Catalan municipalities by understanding the factors associated with the abandonment of PB initiatives. To this end, the project has created a database organised into three electoral mandates of all the PBs implemented with Decidim. The findings show that political factors matter in the survival of PB programmes, aligning in some respects with previous literature and diverging in others. These results indicate that PB – like other democratic innovations – is vulnerable to the political context and its electoral cycles and the need for consolidation of these proposals to overcome political ups and downs.
Within the Data-Driven Campaigning panel of the Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Democracy section, Adrià Mompó Ruiz presented the article co-authored by Oscar Barberà (UV) ‘Data-driven campaigns in Spain: evidence from the 2023 electoral cycle’. It consists of the use of big data in digital electoral campaigns in Spanish political parties, investigating to what extent big data is used and how it influences these campaigns. The study aims to contribute to the analysis of data-driven campaigns in the Spanish context. Through surveys of party members, it examines who participates, what data sources are used and how they are used. It is expected that the use of data will be limited to certain targets and become more frequent in large parties and national elections.
Finally, Tatiana Fernández Paredes participated in the panel Communicating and Convincing in a Digital Age in the section Political parties and their communities in the digital age: How new and established parties organise, mobilise, connect and appeal. He presented a research on the occupation of the digital space, in this case Telegram, by the Spanish far-right VOX through the design of an architecture of 42 provincial broadcasting channels. Through the analysis of affordances, activity patterns and analysis of forwarded messages, it was shown how VOX uses the Telegram space with the aim of alleviating the tension between the internal organisation of the party, based on provincial delegations, and the Spanish political organisation based on autonomous communities.