Monitoring Electoral Democracy: Building a European Research Infrastructure for Comparative Democracy Research

Abstract

Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem), selected for inclusion in the ESFRI Roadmap 2026, is an emerging European research infrastructure designed to strengthen comparative, data-driven research on electoral democracies by connecting, harmonising and improving the discoverability of fragmented data resources. The session will present MEDem’s rationale, its role in the European democracy-research landscape, and the types of data and services it seeks to integrate, including election and elite surveys, media and party-communication text data, political-institutional datasets, country-level indicators and other sources relevant to the study of democratic functioning. It will also introduce MEDem’s approach to interoperability through pre- and post-harmonisation, together with prototype services such as MEDem ATLAS and PolPaL. Combining a concise project presentation, examples of data-linkage and discovery use cases, and an open discussion of community needs, the workshop will show how researchers, data providers, and national or thematic research networks can use, contribute to, and benefit from the infrastructure.