CEPIS’ research platform covers three interrelated thematic areas: Elections and Electoral Conduct, Legislative and Executive Authority, and Public Policy.
All these areas of research are based on previous research activities pertaining to the Faculty’s scientific projects and the contribution of the Faculty’s researchers in key international research networks.
In the thematic area of elections and electoral conduct, CEPIS wishes to maintain continuity in conducting electoral surveys, systematize the material collected to date, to fill the existing gap in exploring the relationship between citizens’ views on individual public policy issues and specific electoral choice, to emphasize the research of party and electoral programs and their public perception, namely the media framing of politics, and to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses of the party and electoral programs from the perspective of shaping the content of public policies.
Ongoing project: Croatian Electoral Studies: Changes in the Patterns of Croatian Voters’ Political Behavior (Project leader: Costa Bovan, Ph.D.)
Between 1990 and 2020, the Faculty of Political Science organized eleven pre-election and post-election surveys. These surveys aimed to gain insight, on nationally representative samples, into a number of aspects of Croatian voters’ political opinion and behavior at a given moment. Although there are a number of scientific articles that have used data from these surveys, most refer to a particular use of large databases. The first objective of this project is therefore to examine trends in the political behavior and opinions of Croatian voters during the period 1990-2020. While a range of concepts has been examined in these surveys, this project will focus on core concepts of electoral conduct. Specifically, research issues are intended to examine changes in citizens’ voting behavior, political participation, political ideology and worldview, party identification, and support for democracy in the stated period. Ultimately, the results of the research should be published in a single publication.
The second objective of this project is to compare the patterns of Croatian voters’ political opinion and behavior at two different points in time, namely at the decline of the coronavirus pandemic as compared to the pre-pandemic period. To meet this objective, the project entails conducting a field survey that would measure select concepts (voting behavior, political participation, political ideology and worldview, party identification, and democracy promotion) in a nationally representative sample. The survey would be conducted on a somewhat smaller scale but would still represent the continuity of the studies to date. Most of all, it would allow comparing and verifying differences in political behavior and citizens’ opinions just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (the previous survey was conducted in February 2020), and (effectively) at the end of the pandemic. The coronavirus pandemic has caused tectonic social changes, and research into its deeper effects on democracy and citizens is only just beginning. This research would therefore provide relevant insight into an important aspect of the socio-political changes caused by the pandemic.
The CEPIS research platform in the field of legislative and executive authority is based on an integral approach to the study of relations between the executive and legislative authority. This approach presupposes a functional relationship between the government and parliament in the process of public governance and public policymaking.
Ongoing project: Who represents us: a study of political representation in Croatia (Project leader: Daniela Širinić, Ph.D.)
The “Who represents us: a study of political representation in Croatia[JR4] ” project is a new research project that focuses on its research goals, but also represents a continuation of longstanding efforts to collect data from a range of researchers. The long-term objective of this project is to collect data and material on the characteristics and behavior of elected political elites, political decision-making patterns, and political representation processes in general. In practice, when electing their MPs or councillors, voters have certain expectations, while representatives interpret their representative role in different ways, namely who they should represent or how. The background concept of political representation is multidimensional. Representation should be considered in terms of the diverse ways in which citizens’ needs and wishes are or can be translated into decision-making processes. Representation is a system of institutional arrangements that includes not only the individual actions of one or a number of MPs but the entire structure of representation arising from the activities of multiple actors.
Accordingly, the analytical strategy of this research is based on the operationalization of the notion of representation, which includes several ways and levels through which citizens can make connections with MPs, but also implies continuity of data collection to achieve the conditions for longitudinal analyses of change in the composition of representation in the long term. In addition to the existing research, we propose research that would continuously collect data on elected political elites. Data would be collected covering several dimensions of representation, ranging from descriptive, to substantive and dynamic-responsive, but also multilevel, thus encompassing political elites at all levels of government: at municipal and city levels, in county councils and assemblies, and Parliament. The analysis of the political representation at the local level is extremely important as the obstacles to citizens’ addressing councilors in municipal councils or city councils should be significantly lower than at the national level, and the quality of the representation should be altogether higher. In addition, data collection at several levels and in multiple units will enable a more successful data analysis and, depending on the response to the research, a better multi-level representation analysis.
The novelty of the CEPIS research approach in the field of public policies is the comparative (international and cross-sectoral) perspective and analytical linking of the actions of social and political actors, election programs and results, and the characteristics of legislative and executive authority with the contents and outcomes of public policies. By choosing such an approach, CEPIS is making a breakthrough in public policy research in Croatia, which has so far been dominated by analyses of individual sectoral policies.
Ongoing project: How does the Government govern? The objectives of Croatian public policies (Project leader: Ana Petek, Ph.D.)
The scientific research project “How does the Government govern?: The objectives of Croatian public policies” began in 2016, under the subheading “Actor and process analysis of political decision-making in the Government of the Republic of Croatia”. The project was carried out within the Center for Empirical Research in Political Science of the Faculty of Political Science, and, since its third cycle, it has been implemented in cooperation with the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb.
Previous sessions of the project included an actor and process analysis of political decision-making in the Government of the Republic of Croatia, and then the project shifted to analyzing the political content of the Government, focusing on the goals of public policies that the Government designs and implements. Objectives, such as formal observations of the desirable future, and statements declaring how the authorities shall act, are a fundamental element of any public policy and are exceedingly diverse. Literature and public policy studies do not offer a standard classification of objectives, their form, and dimensions. Apart from including the aspect of creating public policies in case studies of individual sectors, the objectives of Croatian public policies have not been subject to systematic analysis to date. [JR6] The project was designed as a sub-national comparison of public policies. Given the initial efforts to classify the objectives of Croatian public policies, the project has a descriptive objective – to prepare a detailed description of the variation of the objectives of Croatian public policies. It is based on a descriptive research question: What are the objectives of Croatian public policies, i.e., in which dimensions do the objectives of Croatian public policies differ from one another?
The analysis is based on the coding of strategic documents of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, according to the rules of qualitative analysis of content. The documents were sampled in such a way as to ensure the representation of public policies from all the fundamental public policy areas: classic state sectors, economic policies, social policies, and sectoral policies. In addition, the sample includes multi-sectoral policies aimed at specific social groups comprising various classic sectors and strategies addressing narrower public policy topics. A sample of policies/strategies in the research includes the following sectors: judicial policy, security policy, transport policy, education policy, employment policy, gender equality policy, youth policy, disability policy, reading promotion issue, domestic violence issue, and the issue of encouraging reading, the issue of domestic violence, and the wood production and wood industry-related issue.
The project has developed an original coding scheme for public policy objectives focusing on the thematic aspect of the objectives. A study of the objectives of Croatian public policy was prepared and presented at the International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4), organized by the International Public Policy Association, and the paper was presented as part of the Pushing the Boundaries of Comparative Public Policy panel. The paper co-authored by all the researchers included in the project was then referred to the publication procedure in the renowned international European Policy Analysis journal, and the article entitled Unboxing the Vague Notion of Policy Goals: Comparison of Croatian Public Policies ended up being published in volume 7, issue 2 of the aforementioned journal, p. 451-469. (See https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/epa2.1106).
This year, the article received the EPA Editors’ Choice Best Paper 2021 award! Please find more information on the award at the following link https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/23806567
With reference to approaching research issues, the basis of the CEPIS research platform includes methodological excellence and pluralism of methodological approaches. In addition, the emphasis is placed on the transparency of all stages of the research process, in particular by providing public access to all databases collected and analyzed within CEPIS projects.