Research Centre on Representatives and their Communication (RCRC).

In a context of, across Western democracies, an increasing popular dissatisfaction with political representation, PREPINTACT examines the beliefs, attitudes and behavior of three types of individual intermediary actors— politicians, interest group leaders and journalists—in tandem with the parallel beliefs, attitudes and behavior of ordinary citizens. It argues that in order to get a better grip on how representation works, we need to focus on individual intermediaries. We examine the up- and downstream flows of information that form the core of representation and that connect society with the government system. PREPINTACT has a special interest in political inequality and hypothesizes that disadvantaged societal groups are less adequately represented. Within that general framework, the consortium launches a number of specific, comparative research projects using a range of methods combining social science (experiments, surveys, interviews…) with computational linguistics approaches. The concrete projects look into the accuracy of intermediaries' perception of public opinion, the social bias in their personal networks, the selective communication to their voters/members/audience, the role of social media in reinforcing their attitudes, how they represent within their organizations (parties, media organizations...) etc. Taken together, these projects constitute a never seen, in-depth analysis of how individual intermediaries make representative democracy work (or not).

Keywords:COMMUNICATION, POLITICIANS, COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

Disciplines:Political communication, Political representation, executive and legislative politics, Computational linguistics