ActEU Towards a new era of representative democracy - Activating European citizens’ trust in times of crises and polarization

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

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

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.

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