We are pleased to announce that our team successfully applied for the
Horizon Europe project INTERFACED (2025-2027). Amidst growing protests,
declining trust in democracy and science, and increasing societal
inequalities exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it investigates
diverse forms of non-electoral political participation. At its core are
the so-called interfaces – such as referendums, street protests, social
media debates, petitions or citizen assemblies – through which citizens
may engage in decision-making and governance within representative
institutions.
The principal objective of INTERFACED is to analyse
these participation interfaces, their democratic underpinnings, their
role in mobilizing the least engaged and most disadvantaged groups, and
factors driving participation. Based on the empirical findings, the
project aims to propose policy recommendations to improve the relations
between citizens and their governments and to enhance the accountability
of governance structures.
The project's consortium comprises ten
European countries and Tunesia, and it is led by the City University of
London. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, INTERFACED employs a
comprehensive methodology – including large-scale surveys, experiments,
computational tools, ethnography, textual analysis, and comparative
qualitative methods – to examine the country cases of the United
Kingdom, Denmark and Germany (North-Western Group), Austria, Hungary and
Romania (East-Central Group) as well as Spain, Italy and Tunesia
(Southern Group) for the (post-)pandemic period of 2020-2025.
The
Work Package of Frankfurt investigates the feed through from
participation interfaces into the institutions of representative
democracy. Prof. Dr. Claudius Wagemann engages as Principal Investigator
and Anna Geyer as Research Associate.
