Project description
Rethinking the study of political representation
Political representation is crucial to democracy. Research typically focuses on whether politicians advance citizens’ policy preferences and share similar descriptive characteristics with their constituents. New political theory research looks at innovative, overlooked aspects of representation, such as citizens’ identification with politicians they didn’t vote for. However, these insights have had little impact on the study of representation in quantitative political science, suggesting that important aspects of representation may be neglected. Funded by the European Research Council, the MULTIREP project aims to enable an alternative research agenda on representation. The project will conduct interviews and surveys to determine what aspects of representation are important to citizens, develop new methodological tools to measure citizens’ preferences and politicians’ behaviours, and establish normative standards.
Objective
"Political representation - the relationship between politicians and citizens - is at the core of democracy's legitimacy and functioning. Most empirical research in political science studies two aspects of representation: 1) whether politicians' substantive policy preferences match those of the citizenry, or 2) whether representatives are ""like"" their constituents in terms of descriptive characteristics (e.g. gender or race). However, recent research in political theory has highlighted additional dimensions of the citizen-politician relationship (e.g. whether citizens identify with politicians they have not voted for, how politicians relate to their party) and argued that citizens' own views of how they want to be represented should be the starting point for studying representation. Yet, these insight have barely affected how representation is studied in quantitative political science, suggesting that we may currently neglect important aspects of representation. MULTIREP aims to ascertain whether citizens care about further dimensions of representation and develop the methodological tools to study them, thereby fundamentally reshaping the scope and depth of empirical research in the field. First, it uses in-depth citizen interviews and survey-experimental techniques to determine how people think about representation and which dimensions are most important to them. Second, for the most important dimensions, it develops novel quantitative survey and text-analytical tools to measure citizens' preferences and politicians' behavior. Third, it advances and operationalizes normative standards to assess the quality of representation on these dimensions on the basis of empirical data. Thereby, MULTIREP will enable an alternative research agenda on the citizen-politician relationship that takes a broader perspective. Given citizens' declining trust in democratic politics, we cannot afford to maintain an incomplete picture of what it means for citizens to feel ""represented""."
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.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
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.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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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.
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.
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.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1010 WIEN
Austria
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