A User-Driven and Flexible Procedure for Data Linkin

The PIREDEU program develops a large-scale pilot infrastructure for research into electoral democracy in the European Union. This program comprises, for each of 27 EU member-states five data components: voter studies, candidate studies, content analyses of mass media, content analyses of party manifestos, and contextual data. The infrastructure builds user-friendly tools for integrating these very different kinds of data into data-sets tailored to individual researchers' needs. This paper discusses, after a brief description of the PIREDEU program preconditions for successful data integration (including ex-ante harmonization and pre-linking)a brief overview of the multi-dimensional conceptual space defining different forms of linking the various data componentsthe strategy designed for linking data without restraining users to a limited number of pre-defined possibilities, and to provide analysts to specify the kind of linking that optimally suits their research needs, and the on-line implementation of this strategythe effects of the on-line linking tools on the cohesion of networks of researchers, effective use of data, quality of data and need for new data collectionconditions under which the approach to data linking developed for PIREDEU can be extended to other data holdings (without ex-ante harmonization and pre-linking).