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Campaigning for Democracy is a research cluster at the University of Notre Dame. We study how election campaigns work in countries where democratic competition is contested, and how voters decide between parties in those elections.

We run multi-wave panel surveys around national elections, build open data resources on elections and democratic rule-breaking, teach two courses at Notre Dame, and work with campaign practitioners in the countries we study.

Scatter plot separating how much voters move from how far they are willing to move
Research on voter volatility and democratic choice
Voters at a polling station during the 2022 Brazilian runoff
Elections under contested conditions
A guest speaker in conversation with students in a Notre Dame classroom
Practitioners in the classroom

Images: Senado Federal via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0; own work.

What we study

Voter concerns. What is actually on voters’ minds in a given electorate, and how far those concerns differ from what campaigns assume.

Pivotality. Which voters are genuinely open to appeals from pro-democracy candidates, and whether they are the same people that standard measures of electoral volatility identify.

Messaging. Which appeals reach those voters, and whether emphasizing a rival’s disregard for democratic rules works better or worse than emphasizing the economy.

Support

The cluster is based in the Keough School of Global Affairs and is funded by a three-year Catalyst Grant from the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, in collaboration with the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies.

Keough School of Global Affairs

Notre Dame Democracy Initiative

Kellogg Institute for International Studies

Nanovic Institute for European Studies