Core findings
1.How parties are organized determines to what constituency they respond (Schumacher, de Vries & Vis 2013, Schumacher 2015).
2.Government parties change their program more than opposition parties (Schumacher et al. 2015, Schumacher & Elmelund-Praestekaer 2017).
3.Party organization affects leader tenure (Ennser-Jedenastik & Schumacher 2015) & whether leader changes will be beneficial (Pedersen & Schumacher 2015).
4.Parties have become more leader-dominated; and this means they change their program more (Schumacher & Giger 2017a, 2017b).
Contributions
1.A dataset of more than 18,000 speeches by EU elites, such as prime ministers, EU commissioners, ECB officials and European Parliament leaders (Schumacher et al. 2016).
2.A dataset of combining several data sources that contain party organization data (Giger and Schumacher 2015).
Work in progress
1.A paper reviewing text analysis, bridging political science and psychology approaches and critically evaluating some of our assumptions (with Martijn Schoonvelde and Bert Bakker). Click here for link to paper on the Open Science Framework.
2.A paper analyzing the complexity of speeches of politicians (with Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius and Bert Bakker). Click here for the slides of my presentation at the EPSA Annual Conference in Milan (2017).
3.An analysis of the relationship between party-voter congruence and party organization (with Nathalie Giger).
4.An analysis of party position change showing that on average government coalition partners drift apart (with Mariken van der Velden).
Publications




Nr. | Citation | Supplements |
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Gijs Schumacher & Patrik Ohberg (2020). How do politicians respond to opinion polls? An experiment with Swedish politicians. Research and Politics. | ||
Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik & Gijs Schumacher (2020). What parties want from their leaders: How office achievement trumps electoral performance as a driver of party leader survival. European Journal of Political Research | ||
Denise Traber, Martijn Schoonvelde & Gijs Schumacher (2020). Errors have been made, others will be blamed. Issue engagement and blame shifting in Prime Minister speeches during the economic crisis in Europe. European Journal of Political Research | Replication | |
Nathalie Giger & Gijs Schumacher (2019). Bringing party organization back in: a comparative analysis of party representation in Europe. Political Science Research and Methods. | ||
Gijs Schumacher, Daniel Hansen, Mariken van der Velden & Sander Kunst (2019). A new dataset of Dutch and Danish party congress speeches. Research and Politics , 6, 2. | ||
Martijn Schoonvelde, Gijs Schumacher and Bert Bakker (2019). Friends With Text as Data Benefits: Assessing and Extending the Use of Automated Text Analysis in Political Science and Political Psychology. Journal for Social and Political Psychology . | Replication | |
Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher & Bert Bakker (2019). Liberals Lecture, Conservatives Communicate: analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,475 speeches. PLoS One , 14, 2, e0208450 | Replication | |
Gijs Schumacher & Christian Elmelund-Præstekær (2018). Party performance explains disagreement between politicians and their parties. West European Politics, 41, 2. | ![]() ![]() |
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Roni Lehrer & Gijs Schumacher (2018). Governator vs. Hunter and Aggregator: A Simulation of Party Competition with Vote-Seeking and Office-Seeking Rules. PLOS ONE, 13(2): e0191649. | ![]() ![]() |
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Gijs Schumacher & Nathalie Giger (2017). Do leadership-dominated parties change more? Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. | ![]() ![]() |
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Mariken van der Velden, Gijs Schumacher & Barbara Vis (2017). Living in the Past or Living in the Future? Analyzing Parties’ Platform Change In Between Elections, The Netherlands 1997–2014. Political Communication. | ![]() |
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Jonathan Polk, Jan Rovny, Ryan Bakker, Erica Edwards, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Jelle Koedam, Filip Kostelka, Gary Marks, Gijs Schumacher, Marco Steenbergen, Milada Vachudova, Marko Zilovic (2017). Explaining the Salience of Anti-Elitism and Reducing Political Corruption for Political Parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey Data. Research & Politics 4, 1. | ![]() ![]() |
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Gijs Schumacher & Nathalie Giger (2017). Who Leads the Party? On Membership Size, Selectorates and Party Oligarchy. Political Studies, 65:(1_suppl). | ![]() ![]() |
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Gijs Schumacher & Kees van Kersbergen (2016). Do mainstream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populist parties? Party Politics, 22, 3. | ![]() |
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Gijs Schumacher, Marc van de Wardt, Barbara Vis & Michael Baggesen Klitgaard (2015). How Aspiration to Office Conditions the Impact of Government Participation on Party Platform Change. American Journal of Political Science, 59, 4. | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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Gijs Schumacher (2015). When does the Left do the Right thing? A study of party position change on welfare policies. Party Politics, 21, 1. | ![]() ![]() |
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Christian Elmelund-Præstekær & Gijs Schumacher (2014). Én for alle og alle for én? Mønstre i og effekter af partiintern uenighed blandt folketingskandidaterne ved 2011-valget. Politica, 46, 3. | ![]() ![]() |
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Gijs Schumacher, Catherine de Vries & Barbara Vis (2013). Why do Parties change Position? Party organization and environmental incentives. Journal of Politics, 75, 2. | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Chapters / Data / Other



