Election research in the age of regulated data access under the EU Digital Services Act

Political debates, campaigns, and advertising increasingly take place on online platforms. However, research on election communication has been significantly hampered as formerly accessible data sources have been withdrawn or commercialised. With the implementation of the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) a number of platforms have (re-)established data access modalities for ‘public’ data via APIs or specific portals. How access to public data is implemented, what it contains, and who gets access all depends on decisions by the platforms. This leads to a series of inconsistencies, challenges, and limitations for election research. In this contribution, we discuss the implications of regulated data access under the DSA for election research. We first review central research questions and relevant data types for election research. Then, we provide a historical overview of how data access modalities have changed over the last two decades. Next, we discuss relevant articles of the DSA that aim to improve data access for academic research as well as different data access paths and modalities, including alternatives to APIs such as web scraping and data donations. Finally we summarise key challenges and formulate requirements for data access to enable robust and reproducible election research.