ongoing
ActEU Towards a new era of representative democracy - Activating European citizens’ trust in times of crises and polarization
principal investigator / project leader
Ph.D. / Associate Professor
sociologist and political scientist, specializes in the analysis of poitical systems
Full bio project value: PLN 14,068,190 (EUR 2,999,870)
SWPS University’s budget: PLN 376,254 (EUR 80,250)
funding source: European Research Executive Agency
discipline: political science and administration, social sciences
location: Warsaw
duration: 2023 2024 2025 2026
Trust in politics is in crisis throughout Europe. This is clearly reflected in regular polling. How does politics regain trust and how can young people become more enthusiastic about democratic participation? This is being investigated by the new research project "ActEU" at twelve European universities. The consortium is led by the Institute of Political Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) together with Saarland University.
The project is funded by the Horizon Europe Programme of the European Union (HORIZON-CL2-2022-DEMOCRACY-01)
Project objectives
How can we conceptualize and empirically measure political trust and legitimacy beyond the usual survey question “How much trust do you have in the parliament?”? Does the multi-level nature of European representative democracies require an identical level of citizen support at the regional, national and EU levels? How does social polarization on key policy issues of our times –immigration, climate change, and gender inequality– challenge the political trust in, and legitimacy of, democratic political systems? And what can policymakers and civil society do to master these challenges?
ActEU aims to find answers to these questions pursuing two overarching goals:
- In phase 1, we map and investigate persistent problems of declining trust, legitimacy and representation in Europe with a particular attention to the polarization of societies and the EU’s multi-level structures. Providing an innovative conceptual framework on political attitudes, behavior and representation across Europe, we establish an original empirical infrastructure based on an innovative combination of methods and newly collected quantitative and qualitative empirical data (focus groups, experimental surveys, web scraping).
- In phase 2, these results will flow directly into the creation of a toolbox of remedial actions to enhance political trust in and legitimacy of European representative democracies. In cooperation with a newly created Civil Society Network, Youth Democracy Labs across 13 European cities and in exchange with political cartoonists “Cartooning for democracy”, we will develop context-sensitive solutions for all polity levels and some of the most polarizing policy areas, and craft tailor-made toolkits for both policymakers and civil society and the educational sector. Finally, we deploy a differentiated dissemination strategy to maximize ActEU’s scientific, policy and societal impact in activating European citizens’ trust and working towards a new era of representative democracy.
Consortium members
- Universitaet Duisburg-Essen, Germany – coordinating institution
- Universitat Des Saarlandes, Germany
- Paris-Lodron-Universitat Salzburg, Austria
- Trans European Policy Studies Association, Belgium
- Ustav Mezinarodnich Vztahu V.V.I., Czech Republic
- Abo Akademi, Finland
- Fondation Nationale Des Sciences Politiques, France
- Institut Catholique De Lille, France
- Aristotelio Panepistimio Thessalonikis, Greece
- Unitn Universita Degli Studi Di Trento, Italy
- SWPS University, Poland
- Universidad De Oviedo, Spain
Project activities
The consortium will:
- Provide an infrastructure to assess the decline of political trust and legitimacy
- Research citizens’ attitudes: (Dis-)approval of representative institutions
- Research citizens’ behavior: The changing patterns of citizens’ political participation
- Develop a toolbox of remedial actions
- Disseminate, communicate and exploit project results
Contribution of SWPS University's Center for the Study of Democracy
SWPS University's Center for the Study of Democracy will be responsible for the following tasks of the ActEU project:
- Mapping and unpacking the decline and dynamics of trust in representative institutions and actors across Europe.
- Mapping and documenting trends in the most prominent mode of political activity in EU member states and the UK.
- Mapping and documenting the linkage between (decreasing) levels of trust and political participation patterns in EU member states and the UK.
- Examining for which groups in society, decreasing trust acts as a critical mediator for the changing pattern of citizens’ political participation in Europe.
- Examining the relations between participation choices and trust with a focus on other types of societal groups.
- Examining the role of political or activist affiliations on the basis of the web-scraped data.
- Mapping different patterns of objective representation (descriptive and substantive) in view of declining political trust and legitimacy.
- Examining the relationship between (objective and subjective) representation and trust across time and space.
- Creating teaching materials for schoolteachers and other actors working in the field of citizenship education.
SWPS University’s Deliverables:
Researchers from SWPS University's Center for the Study of Democracy will develop:
- Report on the general dynamics of trust based on secondary data analysis
- Integrated open dataset with micro and macro-level indicators and determinants of trust to be shared through an open repository and Zenodo, a free and open platform for preserving and sharing research output
- Report on voting behavior in Europe
SWPS University's Research Team
Hubert, Wit
Specialization
political scientist
First and last name
Wit Hubert
Academic degree or title
Ph.D.
Email
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Institute
Institute of Social Sciences
Role in the Institute
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Discipline
political-science-and-public-administration
Role in the Department
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Role in the Research Center
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Ph.D. Wit Hubertpolitical scientist
Read more about the project at https://acteu.org/