Summary:

Representative democracies in Europe face demands for more democratic participation and more efficient and effective policy making at the same time coming from the populist and technocratic challenges, as well as simultaneous demands for regional devolution and supra-national integration. As a result, they have been under pressure to reform for some time. As a systematic and theoretically driven repository of such reforms is missing, the project aims to produce a dataset of reforms of representative institutions and processes aimed at enhancing both citizen inclusion and policy effectiveness. Based on a typology of areas of reforms (electoral systems, legislative procedures, participatory rights, legislative−executive relations, etc.), reforms are classified and linked to the dimensions of representation they target, such as inclusion, responsiveness, responsibility, accountability among others.

The dataset covers all member-states of the European Union as well as Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom up to 2022, and links up with data from a past endeavour at EUDO (the forerunner of EGPP), within the SIEPOL (Seclusion and Inclusion in the European Polity) project, directed by Peter Mair and Camille Bedock. The project, directed by Daniele Caramani, has received funding from the Research Council of the EUI.

Sources of Funding:

• European University Institute

Collaborating Institutions:

• European University Institute

External Resources:

www.eui.eu

Research Areas:

• Vergleichende Politik

Summary:

Party polarization—or the degree to which political parties disagree ideologically—is now multidimensional in most European democracies. Continuing to rely on a single left-right dimension risks obscuring an increasingly complex and fragmented political landscape. But what are the consequences of multidimensional polarization for the functioning of democracy? This project seeks to answer that question by [1] mapping multidimensional polarization among political parties across Europe (1970–present), and analyzing its consequences for [2] political engagement (e.g., voter turnout) and [3] partisan hostility. It will do so using a combination of innovative statistical methods, observational analyses, and experimental research designs.

Summary Links:

data.snf.ch

Sources of Funding:

• Swiss National Science Foundation

Contacts:

Internal:

Jelle Koedam

Research Areas:

• Vergleichende Politik

Transversal Research Priorities:

• Demokratie und Demokratisierung

Keywords:

• Polarization
• Dimensionality
• Left-Right
• Political Parties
• Democracy
• Europe

Summary:

The ERC Advanced Grant project GLOBAL applies cleavage theory to the international arena and investigates political oppositions at the global level. Treating the globe as one system, it analyses the cleavages that structure world politics and asks whether conflicts are shaped territorially or along functional alignments cutting across world regions.

The long-term empirical analysis from the 19th century to the present aims to establish if, and under what conditions, international divisions opposing world regions – core−periphery, North−South, or civilisational contrasts – change and are replaced by conflict lines that oppose groups that identify, link organizationally and act in solidarity across borders (classes, educational groups, generations, genders, as well as value groups). The project categorises cleavages according to three types of inequality that lead to global oppositions: economic, political-military and socio-cultural.

The investigation is carried out at the level of citizens, actors and institutions. GLOBAL combines comparative and supra-national approaches that look at the politics of inequality, i.e. how actors compete to politicize more or less equitable redistribution of rights and resources across world regions and across transnational groups. A research strategy based on statistics, scaling techniques, large language models and network analysis is used to explore electoral results, legislations, cleavages, roll-call votes, text produced by actors, individual surveys and organizational data.

Led by Daniele Caramani as Principal Investigator and hosted at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (European University Institute), GLOBAL will lead to an authored book on the globalization of politics, collective volumes and journal articles by the research team, as well as working papers by associated researchers.

Sources of Funding:

• European Research Council

Collaborating Institutions:

• European University Institute

External Resources:

europeangovernanceandpolitics.eui.eu

Research Areas:

• Vergleichende Politik