Political Parties and Issue Framing

In one ongoing project, supported by the Danish Social Science Research Council, Rune Slothuus investigates how communications from political parties influence public opinion. Combining experiments, representative survey data and media content analysis, the project illuminates underlying mechanisms and political conditions for how and when political parties can structure and change individuals' political preferences.

The Interplay of Predispositions and Political Context in Public Opinion Formation

In this project, together with Paul M. Sniderman, Stanford University, and Michael Bang Petersen and Rune Stubager from Aarhus University, Rune Slothuus is studying how issue frames in elite discourse interact with individuals' political values to shape public opinion towards political tolerance, welfare and immigration. The project draws on media content analyses and large-scale opinion surveys conducted in Denmark. The Danish Social Science Research Council and the US National Science Foundation support the project.

Measuring Political Values and Personality among the Danish Public

Good measurement of key variables is fundamental to empirical research. In the current project, Rune Slothuus and colleagues Michael Bang Petersen and Rune Stubager, Aarhus University, and Kasper Møller Hansen, University of Copenhagen, developed and tested a new series of survey questions to improve measures of core political values in Denmark. In addition, they translated and validated the Need to Evaluate scale in the Danish context. A report from the project (in Danish) can be found here.