Social Groups and Electoral Politics: Group Appeals, Targeted Policy and Voter Responses

This Workshop targets a wide range of scholars working on party-voter alignments, campaigns, targeting, electoral behaviour and group politics. We welcome submissions from PhD candidates and early-career researchers, as well as established scholars in the field. Alongside the quality of proposals and their fit with the Workshop subject, Workshop Directors seek a balance in terms of gender, geographical origin and academic age. We invite Papers that are innovative, theoretically informed, and use cutting-edge qualitative and or quantitative methods, such as (semi-)automated text analysis of electoral programs, speeches or social media data, survey experiments or qualitative case studies, to analyze how parties appeal to groups and how groups express demands and react to the electoral supply. We particularly invite comparative perspectives, but also welcome qualitative case studies speaking to the broader debate. We are looking forward to contributions that tackle the question of group politics from the supply- and demand side, as well as those investigating the whole range of socially diverse groups and different kinds of group appeals. Questions addressed in Papers investigating the supply side might be:  To what extent do parties address groups explicitly or implicitly, with particularistic proposals or with rhetoric or more symbolic appeals?  How do parties combine policy issues and group appeals?  When and why do parties negatively address certain kinds of voters?  Does the rise of social media help transform practices of targeting? Are groups addressed differently, reflecting, for instance, their level of resources or perceived deservingness? Does this vary according to contextual factors such as the electoral system, polarization or campaign funding regulations? On the demand side, we welcome Papers that ask:  Do voters’ responses to group targeting vary depending on how (e.g., symbolically, negatively or positively) campaigns address their in-group or other groups? And what is the role of individual group identification?  How do voters react to incumbents’ past targeted policies (retrospective voting)? We are also interested, more broadly, in potential consequences on political attitudes, the feeling of being represented or the salience of identities. Eventually, the Workshop seeks to shed light on the interplay between the demand- and supply-side, considering how citizens react to parties and their supply, but also the other way around. Regarding the range of groups, we explicitly welcome contributions dealing with group appeals more broadly as well as with appeals to specific groups (e.g., women, the youth, the poor, rural population). We also invite Papers that focus on multiple, overlapping and potentially intersecting group identities and the impact of these group-based cross-pressures on voters’ responses. In addition, we are interested in different natures of group appeals (symbolic / particularistic, positive / negative…). We invite not only contributions looking at how voters respond to appeals benefitting them or groups they perceive as deserving, but also at voters’ reactions to negative (out-)group targeting. Finally, we are also looking forward to conceptual contributions from a theoretical and empirical perspective reflecting on how group appeals and targets can be defined and measured.