European representative democracies are currently facing new challenges. One of the most problematic is the critical relationship between the citizens and the political system. In this respect, the Spanish case might be particularly interesting due to the severe economic crisis occurred in the last few years and the austerity measures adopted by the national government and facilitated by external constrains at the supranational level.

The CIUPANEL project proposes to study this relationship with regard to three basic dimensions: 1) the attitudes towards democracy and political disaffection; 2) the attitudes towards the European Union and, finally: 3) the voting behavior. To achieve these goals, the project adopts an innovative research design, which combines a panel study with several survey experiments.

The research consists of an online sample of the Spanish population followed across six different waves: 1) a Pre-European Elections survey (May 2014); a Post-European Elections survey (May-June 2014); an intermediate survey (December-January 2014-2015); a Post-Regional and Local election survey (May-June 2015); a Pre-General election (December 2015); a Post-General election survey (December-January 2015-2016).

Availability of the data

Funding: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Programa Nacional de Internacionalización de la I+D+i.

Ref.: CSO2013-47071-R.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Mariano Torcal