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Content archived on 2024-05-28

The Peformance of Democracies

Objective

This project will use an institutional approach to answer the question why some democracies perform better than others. Democratic systems can be institutionalized in innumerous ways given variation in for example party system, electoral system, type of public administration, judicial control and type of legal system, degree of lobbyism, degree of decentralization, rules for the public budget, possibilities to use referendums, the power of the executive and so on. This huge variation in the institutional configuration of existing democracies will be used for developing a theory for explaining the difference in democracies ability to perform. The motive for this project is the following: Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed must be seen as a remarkable success. Over the last centuries, several waves of democracy have swept over the globe, bringing representative democracy to places where it seemed inconceivable fifty, or even twenty-five years ago. There are certainly many reasons to be enthusiastic about this historically remarkable development. However, this enthusiasm is dampened by three things. One is that empirical research shows that there is only a very weak, or none, or sometimes even negative, correlation between established measures of human well-being and measures of the level of democracy. For example, communist-authoritarian China now outperforms liberal democratic India on almost all measures of population health. The second reason is that a number of democracies turn out to have severe difficulties managing their public finances in a sustainable way. The third problem is that democracy seems not to be cure against pervasive corruption. In fact, many authoritarian countries turn out to be less corrupt than many democratic ones. Empirical research shows that these problems have severe consequences for citizens’ perception of the legitimacy of their political system.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2013-ADG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-AG - ERC Advanced Grant

Host institution

GOETEBORGS UNIVERSITET
EU contribution
€ 2 499 475,00
Address
VASAPARKEN
405 30 Goeteborg
Sweden

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Region
Södra Sverige Västsverige Västra Götalands län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

No data

Beneficiaries (1)

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