The Sustaining Public Administration in Modern Democracies (SUPA) Consortium originates from the observation that public administrations in advanced democracies are increasingly overburdened. Administrative overburdening arises from a continuous increase in the number of rules that require implementation and the relative stagnation in administrative capacities. This discrepancy between the rules up for implementation and the administrative resources available results in suboptimal policy outcomes, low-quality public services, and inconsistent implementation practices. In view of this assessment, it is the central objective of SUPA to examine strategies for enhancing the capabilities of the public sector to cope with the escalating challenges of administrative overburdening. To this end, SUPA pursues two interrelated objectives: The first one is to examine how decision-making procedures and practices can be improved to limit the overall burdens placed on the administration. The second goal is to explore how administrative structures can be reformed to manage ongoing rule growth effectively. SUPA examines patterns of rule growth and the resulting administrative changes and challenges in six European States (Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands) and the European Union. Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, SUPA (1) evaluates the effectiveness of so-called "rule-offsetting" schemes; (2) investigates how legislators can embed legal design principles to prevent unintended rule growth cascades; (3) assesses how policy growth affects the underlying administrative structures; and (4) examines citizens' experience and operational challenges linked to different ways of distributing implementation burdens across public authorities. SUPA has formed collaboration agreements with multiple public authorities, ensuring that the Consortium's findings can be directly transferred to both policy-makers and administrators in the field.

Higher education institutions today operate in a rapidly changing environment - teaching and learning in higher education are being influenced by a well-rehearsed set of global trends such as the changing demography of student populations; growing global interconnectedness and the proliferation of digital media; and an increasing market orientation in higher education. Among societal trends are challenges that most (if not all) European democracies today face; in particular, disenchantment with political representation and skepticism regarding policy decisions among young people who are at risk of being increasingly alienated from public political life. In addition, research suggests that students from an immigrant background are even more excluded from participation, as they appear to be at a disadvantage in terms of civic knowledge. It is within this environment that NEXUS examines the role HEIs have in promoting civic and social responsibility of students, with an emphasis on including migrant students in such initiatives.Higher mobility rates at HEIs have led to increasingly diverse classrooms, and the need to educate students with a more global perspective of what it means to be a citizen became more salient. The objective of NEXUS project is to empower students (with a special emphasis on migrant students) to enjoy their rights, uphold human rights values, and contribute positively to their society and the global community. It will do so by innovating civic education through 4 main pillars of intervention, resulting in increased participation of students in social life of their communities. NEXUS will explore the relationship between digitally enabled participatory tools and democracy, including such dimensions as citizen demand, state power, collective action and mobilization, and culture. Building on the idea that many opportunities for meaningful civic learning exist in online environments NEXUS uses technologies that are familiar and appealing to digital natives. We will analyse possibilities and challenges facing the digital transformation of politics in a specific context of a student body, and growing population of students with migration background. To enhance citizen engagement processes among students, educators should be aware of available and existing digital tools for democratic participation. They also need to know how to use them and what they aim to solve/address. Our approach favours interactive, networked activities often communicated through participatory media shared across online networks. NEXUS is a Strategic Partnership for higher education project that applies innovative approaches in promoting the nexus of migrants through activecitizenship. It brings together academia (UNED - Spain, UNIMED - Italy, Malmo University), experts in digital democracy and citizens' participation (ECAS - Brussels), NGO with expertise in community engagement in higher education (IDE - Croatia), SME that deploys innovative and digital solutions to address challenges in higher education (KIC - Malta), and grass-root Institute that uses socially engaging multimedia for inclusion of diverse communities (APIS - Slovenia).The project is arranged around four pillars of activity:Pillar 1: Civic education micro-learning unitsWill lead to the production of a MOOC on Civic education for students with migration backgroundPillar 2: Community engagement (learning) and service-learning guidelines for UniversitiesWill see the creation of a knowledge-sharing platform for civics-educators, focused on migration, and guidelines for HEIs on student’s civic engagement, focusing on the nexus family-community-civil society-state-HEI. A strategic framework on civic engagement of HEIs will emphasise how service-learning can address the needs of migrant students' inclusion Pillar 3: Re-wiring Civics to 4.0: connecting students to institutions in the digital ageWill see the compilation of an inventory of digital tools for Open Democracy and digital citizenship education, a handbook for educators on civic education for a digital age and the organisation of a training seminar for educators on the same topicPillar 4: #DIYCivics – campaigning for effective citizenshipFinally, the fourth pillar we see the production of a podcast on civic education and documentaries featuring migrant student activists.The expected impact of NEXUS' approach is to enable and support HEIs in recognizing the value of different citizenship styles and emerging online environments, that may supplement or supplant civic knowledge of diverse student body.

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.

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.

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.