The first round of the POLPOP project was carried out in 2018 in five countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany and Switzerland.
The project had two main goals:
- To examine to what extent elected politicians have accurate perceptions of citizens’ preferences, both of voters in general and of their party’s supporters
- To explain why some politicians hold more accurate perceptions than others.
This project was supported by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) [grant number G012517N], the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) [grant number T.0182.18], the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, the Ausschuss für Forschungsfragen (AFF 2018) at the University of Konstanz), and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [grant number 100017_172559].