The Danish National Election Study (DNES) joins an impressive list as one of nine projects now receiving funding from the Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s special pool for research infrastructure. In total, DKK 150 million are given to the nine projects and DNES has been awarded DKK 2,690,000 of these funds. Rune Stubager, professor of political science at Aarhus University, participates in the study.

DNES will use the funds to collect data about the Danes' voting behaviour at the next general election and write a book about the election topics as well as topics with importance beyond the individual elections, such as populism and the Danes’ attitude to climate change.

Rune Stubager looks forward to working with the new election data:

“In the election project, we are both pleased and proud to be recognised as a part of the national research infrastructure. This will help secure the future of the election study. Our data make up the most long-running series of surveys concerning opinions and choices of political party among the Danes and therefore form a unique contribution to understanding the core of our democracy – the citizens’ decision on who should represent their views in the Danish Parliament,” he says and continues:

“We continuously work with these data to understand the development, also in relation to the future where e.g. the climate issue will be at the top of the agenda to the citizens. Our analyses are published in Denmark as well as internationally and we look forward to soon presenting our next title, the book The Danish Voter, which will be published by the American publishing house University of Michigan Press this spring."

DNES has existed since 1971 and supply researchers as well as the general public with data on the Danes’ voting behaviour. The aim is to provide updated data on Danish values and politics and “an in-depth understanding of how modern voting behaviour and democracy has developed over the last 50 years,” as it says in the Ministry of Higher Education and Science’s Danish Roadmap for Research Infrastructure. Here you can read more about the Danish National Election Study, which also has its own website, www.valgprojektet.dk.