Description du projet
La polarisation affective est-elle à l’origine du recul de la démocratie?
Des signes de régression démocratique sont observés dans le monde entier et, dans de nombreux pays, la politique est de plus en plus marquée par l’hostilité et la méfiance au-delà des lignes partisanes. Il s’agit d’un phénomène connu sous le nom de polarisation affective. Cette polarisation affective est-elle à l’origine d’un recul démocratique? Bien qu’il existe plusieurs conjectures théoriques sur la manière dont la polarisation affective sape la démocratie, les preuves et les interventions fiables sont insuffisantes. Le projet DEPOLARIZE, financé par l’UE, identifiera des interventions expérimentales fiables et généralisables visant à réduire la polarisation affective dans divers contextes et déterminera toute relation de cause à effet entre la polarisation affective et le déclin des attitudes démocratiques. Le projet produira et analysera des données d’observation et d’expérimentation de haute qualité provenant de plusieurs enquêtes menées en Hongrie, en Pologne, en Turquie et aux États-Unis.
Objectif
We currently witness democratic backsliding around the world where political rights, civil liberties, and free and fair elections are under assault. At the same time, politics in many countries are increasingly characterized by hostility and distrust across partisan lines; a phenomenon called affective polarization. Could there be a causal link between the two? Despite several theoretical conjectures about how affective polarization erodes democracy through its negative effects on citizens’ democratic attitudes, we lack the evidence to support them. We also do not have reliable interventions to reduce affective polarization that are generalizable to different contexts.
DEPOLARIZE addresses these puzzles around affective polarization with two objectives. First, it will identify reliable and generalizable experimental interventions to reduce affective polarization in multiple contexts. Second, it will establish any causal relationship between affective polarization and changes in democratic attitudes through novel empirical approaches.
DEPOLARIZE will achieve these goals by producing and analysing high-quality observational and experimental data from multiple waves of surveys in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the US. These countries are selected for analyses because they have recently experienced democratic backsliding to different degrees, and they are also examples of high levels of affective polarization in society.
The stakes for identifying factors contributing to democratic backsliding could not be any higher. DEPOLARIZE will contribute to this effort by establishing whether affective polarization is a factor driving democratic backsliding using state-of-the-art causal inference methods. DEPOLARIZE is also one of the first projects in political science to employ comprehensive measures for cumulative learning: coordinated and comparable randomized controlled trials in multiple contexts with pre-registration of experimental interventions.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Institution d’accueil
34450 Istanbul
Turquie