Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-06-18

NEGAtive REpresentation: Ostracism, Recall and Negative Voting as Electoral Innovations Against Extremism

Objective

In the last two decades, Europe has been witnessing a steady rise of anti-democratic trends and disappointment with politics. Faced with these challenges, contemporary democracies appear vulnerable and unable to defend themselves. This project proposes a democratic theory of ‘negative representation’ that involves the re-activation of electoral agency with the aim of producing responsible leadership. I suggest to view representation not only from the usual viewpoint as a process of selecting ‘the best’ to govern, but also from the reverse perspective as a process of de-selecting ‘the worst’-performing governors. More specifically, I will examine three applied instances of negative democratic representation: 1) ostracism, the practice of temporarily expelling a political figure from ancient Greek city-states by decision of the demos; 2) recall elections, the removal of a public official through direct vote before the end of their term of office, practiced at present for local officers in the United States, Germany and elsewhere and 3) negative voting, the registration and counting of negative votes alongside positive ones in regular elections. These institutions are compared and discussed together as subjects of democratic theory, with a focus on their merits and limitations. The aim of this project is to introduce a new tool against extremism and political opportunism into the literature on political representation and democratic innovations and thus open the stage for further scholarly and political debate.

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: The European Science Vocabulary.

You need to log in or register to use this function

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.

FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF
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.

MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)

Coordinator

UPPSALA UNIVERSITET
EU contribution
€ 197 811,60
Address
VON KRAEMERS ALLE 4
751 05 Uppsala
Sweden

See on map

Region
Östra Sverige Östra Mellansverige Uppsala län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
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
My booklet 0 0