La politique au Luxembourg : de la nécessité d'une nouvelle approche méthodologique pour analyser la participation et la représentation politique dans une société pluraliste - POLUX

Coordinating Institution: Université du Luxembourg
Contracting Partner(s): European University Institute, European Union Democracy Observatory , University of Zürich (CH)
From: 01/04/2009
To: 30/09/2011
Budget: 223,700.00€
Contact(s): Dumont Patrick , Kies Raphaël , Poirier Philippe

Summary

The project Polux is based on two main objectives. The first one is to evaluating the electoral impact and the scientific usefulness of the online Voting Advice Application (VAA) tool that has been introduced for the first time in Luxembourg under the label smartvote.lu. The results obtained so far on this first project fulfill particularly well the expectations of the research team for the following reasons:

1) the smartvote website that was introduced one month before the elections in four languages (French, Portuguese, Luxemburgish, German) was particularly “user-friendly” and received a great attention of the media;

2) More than half of the candidates at the national elections elaborated their political profiles (i.e. 236 candidates);

3) more than 37,000 profiles were elaborated: for a population of approximately 200,000 voters who were not familiar with the VAA, this is a particularly high score.

From the viewpoint of the scientific analysis, we have gathered a large database containing the official positions of parties, the answers of the candidates who have elaborated their political profiles, and the replies of the users of smartvote. This promising material that we started processing will allow us to scrutinize and test several relevant questions such has the positioning of parties and candidates in political space, party cohesion, voter-party and voter-candidates policy congruence, the potential for using data drawn from VAAs as alternatives of traditional mass surveys in the future (by comparing data drawn from the two sources) and the political impact of VAAs on opinion formation, electoral behavior and political participation at large.

We are confident that the richness and originality of the material will enable us to disseminate our results through several scientific articles in international peer-reviewed journals. The second objective consists in the setting up of a complementary tool, what we termed the Legislative Monitoring Application (LMA), which will enable citizens to check the parliamentary behaviour of their representatives on legislation during the first part of the new parliamentary term.

This second part of the project is in its preparation phase, as the research team has gathered relevant examples of similar systems around the world in order to evaluate them and decide on which would better be adapted to the Luxemburgish context through this benchmarking exercise.

Refereed Scientific Publications:

none so far.

Other Publications:

Kies Raphaël and Patrick Dumont, “smartvote.lu: symbole d’une web-mutation de la campagne”, Letzebuerger Land, 12 juin 2009

Project Website:

Figure 1: SMARTVOTE Logo

Figure 2: POLUX Smartspider