Acronym: PLEDGE
Title: Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance
Call: HORIZON-CL2-2023-DEMOCRACY-01
EU nr: 101132560
Period: 1 February 2024 – 31 January 2027
Total budget: € 2,771,272.50; VUB budget: € 191,722.50
Contact: Prof. Dr. Karen Celis
ABSTRACT
Contemporary politics is angry and vengeful, with affective polarization and uncompromising antagonisms posing a significant challenge for European democracies and their governance. PLEDGE interprets political grievances as emotional signals of disaffection, frustration and insecurities that can develop into either anti- or prodemocratic outcomes. By engaging in collaborative research design and implementation involving academics, policy-makers, civil society actors, and citizens, the PLEDGE project intends to offer new understanding of anti- and pro-democratic trajectories of political grievances, and to co-create tools and practices of emotionally intelligent and responsive democratic governance and policy communication that promote prodemocratic forms of civic engagement. The project will provide a framework of the emotional mechanisms of anti- and prodemocratic grievance politics that explain dynamic interrelations between the emotions, values, and identities of citizens and groups, and empirically decode the psychological, sociocultural, and political drivers of these emotional mechanisms into operationalizable measures and indicators, focusing on 11 countries and 3 major crises (pandemic, war in Ukraine, climate/energy crisis). PLEDGE will achieve these objectives through a cross-national interdisciplinary research project involving 15 partners and its policy outputs, co-created and piloted in design coalitions, will inform democratic innovation of processes and practices and incorporate emotions in the designed-for outcomes, thus improving their efficiency.
AIM (WHAT)
The main ambition of the PLEDGE project is to analyse the emotional economy of grievance politics in this complex context characterised by climate change, war in Ukraine, and a recent pandemic. The consortium will investigate the anger and frustrations experienced by citizens (often concealing anxiety, insecurity and shame), and how they are exploited by populist and authoritarian actors to gain support. Concretely, the project’s general objectives are: (i) to understand the emotional determinants and outputs of anti- and pro-democratic grievance politics; (ii) to increase awareness of how the emotional economy of grievance politics impacts policymaking; and (iii) to generate practical resources for effective policymaking and communication, which will enhance emotionally intelligent and responsive democratic governance.
METHODOLOGY (HOW)
To achieve its ambition, the PLEDGE consortium will use a broad conceptual framework which will allow them to analyse grievance politics not just as an individual affair, but placing the problem at the intersection of psychological, political, and socio-cultural dynamics. The project will focus on how political dynamics (e.g. styles of leadership), sociocultural dynamics (e.g. gender and ideologies), and psychological dynamics (e.g. trust and emotional needs) interact with grievances (resentment and social sharing) through emotional mechanisms, resulting in anti- or pro-democratic feelings. The empirical framework of the project will rely on: 1) novel empirical research projects informed by Democratic Design (namely, a methodology to solve identified democratic problems by designing democratic innovations); and 2) input from already existing data and secondary sources.
IMPACT (WHY)
PLEDGE will make multiple significant contributions at the scientific, societal (policy and civic society), and economic level. More specifically, the project will: deliver a solid framework for studying the role of emotions on political grievances; produce a unique body of original data; deliver actionable policy recommendations; produce high-level training on design-thinking and storytelling methodologies; create toolkits for NGOs and CSOs on converting anti-democratic grievance politics into pro-democratic actions; develop practices for facilitating communication of policies to citizens; and develop new methodological tools for capturing the emotional factors that drive public opinion.