A Promise is a Promise! Unfolding the Electoral Ramifications of Political Compromises
In her VENI, Mariken van der Velden theorizes that political compromises force politicians to strategically communicate their decisions in order to mitigate electoral costs. Comparing the Dutch, German and Spanish case, she test her argument at three levels: the politicians level, employing advanced computational text approaches coupled with case-oriented approaches to identify how politicians make compromises and when they adapt their rhetoric to justify them; on the voter level, experimentally investigating the willingness to accept compromises using Virtual Reality techniques; and bridging the two by utilizing regression and experimental techniques to study the real-world effects of compromises.