Collaborative Projects

The ‘Secret Garden’ of Portuguese Politics: Candidate Selection in Portugal

[Funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation; 2018 – 2021]

This project uncovers the intra-party dynamics of candidate selection. Three questions motivate the collaborative project: (1) How do Portuguese parties select their candidates for office? (2) What is the impact of selection processes on the nature of political representation? And (3) how candidate selection has evolved since the Portuguese democratic transition. As a member of the Research Team, I am responsible for the design and implementation of survey experiments with party officials.

Ethics and Integrity in politics: perceptions, control, and impact

[Funded by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos; 2019 – 2021]

In this project we try to understand the impact of violating ethical standards in public office on public and elite attitudes. Four questions guide our study: 1) What is ethical and unethical conduct in public office, for citizens and politicians? (2) How is the reputational risk associated with unethical conduct perceived by both groups? (3) What measures have parties, parliaments, and governments implemented to mitigate unethical behavior? And (4) What is the perceived effectiveness of these measures? As a member of the Research Team, I am responsible for the implementation of the elite survey with Portuguese MPs.

Executive Approval Project (EAP)

[2017 – ]

The EAP seeks to contribute to the study of public support for political executives across the world. The Executive Approval Database contains quarterly and monthly time series measures of executive approval for more than 50 countries. I am responsible for the Portuguese component of the project.

Comparative Campaign Dynamics Project (CCDP)

[Funded by the German Science Foundation; 2014 – 2017]

CCDP is a cross-national project that tracks campaign messages by party leaders and journalists in ten European countries during the last decade. The goal of the project is to explore how political parties change their policy positions throughout the course of an election campaign. The project is directed by Marc Debus (University of Mannheim), Margit Tavits (Washington University in St. Louis), and Zeynep Somer-Topcu (The University of Austin at Texas). As part of the project, I co-led the Portuguese team with José Santana-Pereira. Currently CCDP is applying for a second wave of data collection.

POPSTAR (Public Opinion Sentiment Tracking, Analysis, and Research)

[Funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation; 2012 – 2014]

POPSTAR was a collaborative research initiative by ICS-UL, INESC-ID, FEUP and NIPE-UM that explored web-based conventional and social media with text mining and generated indicators of both frequency and polarity (positivity/negativity) of mentions to political actors, the economy, and economic policies across sources and over time. The project is funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation. Our ultimate goal is to analyze the relationship between survey/poll-based indicators of public opinion and indicators of salience and polarity of opinion in web-based conventional and social media texts. My role in the project was to collect and manage the dataset of public opinion surveys published in the media and to update the website with new data available.