A research project by Allan Sikk (University College London) and Philipp Köker (Leibniz University Hannover) on electoral candidates and party evolution.
Using an original data set of 200,000 parliamentary candidates in 9 European democracies as “Big Data”, we analyse the evolution of parties and party systems. Our research was initially funded as part of the FP7 ANTICORRP project and is now funded by University College London and Leibniz University Hannover.
 Dr Allan Sikk is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. His research mostly concerns political parties and elections, particularly new parties and party system change. |
 Dr Philipp Köker is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Leibniz University Hannover. His research focusses on presidential politics and political parties, particularly presidential veto power and indirect elections. |
We have presented our research at a number of international conferences, including APSA, ECPR and PSA. You can find some of our papers below:
We have compiled a comprehensive data set on electoral candidates in 11 Central and Eastern European democracies during the last 25 years (over 250,000 records) and are in the process of extending it to other democracies. For managing and analysing the data set, we have developed extensive code in R that includes innovative elements of machine learning. We plan to make our data set publicly available upon publication of our first monograph.
