Redirect

Introduction

The focus of the call entitled: ‘Horizon-CL2-2022-Democracy’ is to have a better understanding of the current transformations of representative democracy in Europe at national and supranational level, and at the interconnection between different levels of territorial representation. REDIRECT wishes to assess whether the centre of gravity of democratic representation is shifting away from the traditional forms of political intermediation, such as parties, parliaments, and party-based government, and whether other forms of political representation are taking their place.

Thus, REDIRECT major objectives are 2-fold. The consortium aims at addressing:

a) what are the nature, scope, aspects and causes of the representative disconnect; and

b) how can the current representative disconnect be addressed, ameliorated, and/or rectified?

REDIRECT will address these questions both theoretically and empirically in a series of closely related steps.  To have a more in-depth understanding of the project REDIRECT we have asked Eline 2 questions: What is REDIRECT about and Why is it important?

What is REDIRECT about?

There is a diffuse malaise in European democracies, fuelling a sense of crisis and uncertainty.

The crisis of these institutions, as well as the changing attitudes and behaviour of citizens and political elites towards politics, have made the linking of the citizenry to the governing institutions more difficult and haphazard. The causes to this phenomenon of regression, which risks undermining the trust in and legitimacy of the overall system of democratic representation, are multiple and mutually reinforcing. This signals that an astute diagnosis of the representative disconnect requires a holistic and multidimensional approach. To better seize this, REDIRECT will develop an analytical framework to identify the nature and magnitude of the representative disconnect, perform diagnostic analyses, develop a range of recommendations bent on rectification of the disconnect. Some are labelled as ‘reconnection’ (re-establishing), here we speak about repair or improvements along well-established paths of political intermediation.  Others are labelled as ‘redirection’ and involve either a more fundamental redesigning (new institutions aiming at revitalising the relationship) of the democratic system and institutions of political intermediation or address the emotive mis-alignment between citizens and political elites.

Why is it important?

Today we lack a systematic, coherent assessment of the political disconnect that considers both how the disconnect is related to the transformations of contemporary advanced democracies, and how such transformations affect different aspects of the structure, institutions, and the operations of political representation and intermediationWe need to investigate how the representative system is embedded in a broader representative ecosystem. It is the interaction between the institutional system of representation and the representative ecology that results in political discourses, and incentivizes citizens and politicians to form opinions, mobilizes around them. It is also this interaction (and the potential contestation it enables) that makes representative democracy democratically legitimate. REDIRECT, in addition, brings a dual focus on: at one side the institutional features of such interaction and on the other side the emotional and affective dimensions related to the representative disconnect. The VUB team is embedded in long-standing research programmes on: Democratic Governance in Europe and other projects such as NOTLIKEUS that researches ‘affective polarisation’. VUB has extensive expertise in the recruitment of hard-to-reach social groups (ethnic minority groups, destitute groups), conducting interviews and focus groups and content analysis.

The project on urban youth can rely on the Center for Information, Documentation and Research on Brussels (https://www.briobrussel.be/). Gendered analyses are supported by the VUB Centre of Expertise on Gender, Diversity and Intersectionality (https://rhea.research.vub.be/).

Aim

The focus of REDIRECT is to study the current transformation of democratic polities in Europe, to determine whether and how their centres of gravity are shifting towards non-electoral politics, and to improve our understanding of the “representative disconnect” – a multidimensional phenomenon of regression of the demos-kratos linkage involving institutional, behavioural and affective components. REDIRECT is centred on the ambition to study representative democracy in a comprehensive and holistic manner, connecting several relevant dimensions of analysis, in order to extract sustainable ideas and viable instruments to cope with the current problems of “democracy in flux”.  These, in turn, will allow a parsimonious formulation of remedies, to be activated both at the institutional level (i.e. assuring a future to crucial “mediating bodies” of representatives democracy like parties, leaders, parliamentary institutions), and at the level of civil society.

Methodology

In parallel to a critical review of the theoretical reflection on representative democracy, an interdisciplinary and multi-level approach to several empirical dimensions of the phenomenon of representative disconnect will be offered, focusing on several topics: the crisis of representation, trust in institutions and political representatives, political personalization, political individualism, mass-élite congruence, social and social-media discontent.

Impact

The long-term outcomes expected from the project mark the passage from the diagnosis to the strategies for rectification. Indeed, REDIRECT aims at provides a number of pragmatic recommendations to rearrange the demos-kratos relationship along a two-way street of intervention: the top-down way of institutional reforms (i.e., legislative and procedural innovation to ensure transparency and full information to citizens) and the bottom-up way of a stronger liaison between citizens and mediating bodies (i.e., remobilizing citizens via digitalization, diffusion of share values of social sustainability and civic education).