DEMOS is built on the assumption that populism is symptomatic of a disconnect between how democratic polities operate and how citizens perceive their own aspirations, needs and identities within the political system. As such, DEMOS explores the practical value of ’democratic efficacy’ as the condition of political engagement needed to address the challenge of populism. The concept combines attitudinal features (political efficacy), political skills, knowledge, and democratic opportunity structures. In order to better understand populism DEMOS addresses its hitherto under-researched aspects at micro-, meso-, and macro-levels: its socio-psychological roots, social actors’ responses to the populist challenge, and populism’s effects on governance. DEMOS focuses not only on the polity, but equally on citizens’ perspectives: how they are affected by, and how they react to, populism. Politically underrepresented groups and those targeted by populist politics are a particular focus, e.g. youth, women, and migrants. As populism has varying socially embedded manifestations, DEMOS aims at contextualising it through comparative analysis on the variety of populisms across Europe, including their historical, cultural, and socioeconomic roots, manifestations, and impacts. DEMOS develops indicators and predictors of populism and elaborates scenarios on the interactions of populism with social actors and institutions both at the national and the EU levels. Unifying 15 partners from 10 disciplines, DEMOS combines in-depth research on populism and democratic efficacy with action research and pilot projects in order to develop lasting tools and timely policy recommendations; project methods include experiments, deliberative polling, text mining, surveys, and legal analysis. DEMOS places strong emphasis on communication and productive interactions with a variety of stakeholders throughout the project, including policymakers, journalists, students, and the general public.

Amidst the rise in protest, democratic and scientific mistrust, as well as growing societal divisions and inequalities heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic, INTERFACED investigates the diverse forms of political participation that have arisen subsequently. We approach the period since the onset of the pandemic as an opportunity to contribute to the destination Innovative Research on Democracy and Governance of the Work Programme, to its cardinal goal to reinvigorate democratic governance and empower active and inclusive citizenship. We do so by distinguishing participation interfaces between citizens and representative institutions to then investigate their capacity to include citizens within decision-making and governance. INTERFACED pursues seven specific objectives that move the analysis of these interfaces beyond the state-of-the-art with the aim to enhance relations between citizens and governments. The objectives will be attained with a comprehensive methodological apparatus—combining large-scale surveys and experiments with computational, ethnographic, textual and comparative qualitative methods. Together with the topical selection of a diverse set of eight European countries and Tunisia—spanning multiple forms of opposition, including opposition to authoritarianism—INTERFACED will thereby offer a systematic and inclusive basis from which to produce new and innovative research findings, and from which to scaffold policy recommendations to maximize the mobilization and minimize the demobilization of the least engaged and most disadvantaged social groups.

EU – CIEMBLY addresses the need for the introduction of new forms of citizens’ participation and deliberation in EU political life and, particularly, an EU Citizens’ Assembly whose design and implementation fully addresses issues of intersectionality, inclusiveness, and equality. While there has been an admirable appetite to improve the landscape of participatory and deliberative democratic mechanisms at the EU level, this has not always been accompanied by adequate considerations of how to build these mechanisms to ensure avoidance of intersectional discrimination and the exclusion of vulnerable groups of citizens. In fact, the concept of ‘intersectionality’ within EU law has presented difficulties even without bringing into the picture the context of citizens’ democratic participation. The time is ripe to create a new participatory tool with intersectionality at the forefront. This project will provide the analytical framework and the prototype through which such a tool can be created in the form of a Citizens’ Assembly that can be established at the EU level and with features allowing for the transfer of a (modified) prototype to the national and local levels of EU Member States. To do this, the project moves from theorising to evaluating and finally piloting such a tool and concludes with recommendations. In this way, EU-CIEMBLY seeks to be the first project that uses an academic and theoretical understanding of issues of intersectionality, equality, and power relations in the design of an innovative and inclusive EU Citizens’ Assembly.

No European should be put at a disadvantaged because of the European Green Deal (EGD). BOLSTER will deliver new scientific evidence on decarbonization transition strategies and how they intersect with various dimensions of inequality, such as gender, race, age and class. It will conceptualize the principle of leaving no one behind by developing participatory governance models and transition guidelines based on climate justice and gender equality. BOLSTER will launch action research in ten European regions. Seven of those regions are at high risk of being affected by the EGD, as they have a high concentration of carbon-intensive industries. The other three regions have already undergone an economic transition and will be studied in order to learn from the past. Research shows that transition policies predominantly benefit already privileged citizens and often tend to reproduce social inequalities. Moreover, there is a growing polarization vis-à-vis transition plans. The overall aim of this project is to understand how marginalized communities are affected by EGD-related policies and to see whether involving them in decision-making processes increases the support for transition plans. To achieve this goal, BOLSTER will use novel qualitative research methods with participatory approaches to improve the understanding of the experiences and needs of marginalized communities. Next, it will organize multi-actor forums with key actors in the regions. In order to enable balanced participation from all social groups, special attention will be paid to enhancing the capacities of organizations that represent marginalized groups. Moreover, BOLSTER will actively contribute to addressing procedural justice aspects in the transition process. The goal of the multi-actor forums is to increase support for the transition plans by better accommodating the needs of marginalized groups. We believe that BOLSTER’s activities will foster a more just transition.

Liberal democracy is struggling with the challenge of citizens’ indifference and detachment from politics, while anti-system politicians are overemotionalising policy issues which furthers polarisation in society. The normative stance of MORES is that both under- and overemotionalisation of politics should be avoided. The former leads to the affective disconnect of citizens from politics, while the latter spurs tribal politics and hampers deliberation – both extremes threaten democracy. MORES argues that moral emotions and moralised political identities – a conceptual innovation of the project – have a practical value in dealing with the challenges of affective politics. Moral emotions are linked to the interests or welfare of society or at least of persons other than the subject itself. They can unite people towards common causes or split them along moralised political identities. MORES applies a horizontally wide research logic to build a normative-analytical framework to inform democratic decision-making on how moral emotions should interact with values, policies and political practices. MORES will create state-of-the-art methods and generate new empirical data on (1) the type of moral emotions triggered by political actions and phenomena such as campaigns, leadership styles and illiberal politics; (2) the role of moral emotions in forging moralised political identities; (3) the effect of moral emotions on political behaviour such as policy support and civic activism; and (4) the contextual social phenomena, including digital universes, of the moral emotions-politics nexus. Through research engagement with key stakeholders, MORES will create several innovative tools including a method for policymakers to measure the emotional valence of policies, games to strengthen citizens’ political-emotional resilience both in real-life and metaverses, and policy ideas to embed citizens’ moral-emotional needs in policymaking towards bolstering trust in democratic governance.