PolDem is an interactive observatory on political conflict in Europe in both the electoral and the protest arena. This project is conducted by the European University Institute  (EUI) and the Center for Civil Society Research, a joint initiative by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Freie Universität Berlin.

The objective is to provide the scientific and non-scientific community with continuously updated data on the main issues and actors structuring electoral and protest politics in Europe. More importantly, the observatory hosts original mass media data on election campaigns in 15 European countries and on protest events in 30 European countries. Both datasets are based on earlier large-scale projects of the coordinators of the data portal (in particular, the DFG & SNF-funded project ‘Political Change in a Globalizing World’ and the ERC-funded project ‘Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession’ POLCON).