Digipol joins the EU-PEOPLE 2024 a cooperation initiative between several research groups from seven EU countries.
The EU-PEOPLE 2024 project will contribute to the collection of data and research on the transformation of elections, parties, campaigns and voters by digital technology. This line of research has focused on both the increasing use of digital methods of decision-making and communication in traditional parties and the increasing use of digital political participation methods by party members and citizens.
The main objective of EU-PEOPLE is to provide survey data and comparative analyzes on digital political participation and media consumption during the 2024 European Parliament election campaign in seven European Union countries. In order to have an adequate research design, we have identified seven countries for the empirical study: France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain. Case selection was based on variation in our main control variable, the degree of digitization of the economy and society at the national level. Other macroeconomic variables have also been taken into account in the selection: the geographical region within Europe; the political system (effective number of parties and political polarization, perception of corruption, participation in the last general and European elections); the economy (DESI and GDP indices); and parameters linked to digital inequalities (internet penetration rate, average age, Facebook users and Facebook users in relation to the size of the population).
EU-PEOPLE is born from a collaboration initiative of different universities from each of the seven countries that are part of the empirical study. The survey will be conducted online (respondents could answer via smartphone or computer) at the beginning of June 2024 in all countries simultaneously using several professional survey companies. In each country, a representative sample of around 1,500 members of the national population aged 18 and over who register to vote will be surveyed.
The data will be analyzed by the different members of the project from the second semester of 2024. Multivariate statistical techniques will be used (regressions, geometric data analysis, latent class analysis, etc.) to identify the groups most vulnerable to the practices of political disinformation and to evaluate the main consequences of these phenomena on their (digital) political participation and electoral behavior. The collective results will be presented at several international academic conferences.
More information on the project website
