Over the past few years, democratic institutions throughout Europe have been confronted with mounting challenges associated with emotional polarisation, misinformation and an increasing emotional gap between citizens and decision-makers. Though emotions have never been absent from political existence, their function - particularly in enabling constructive involvement - has largely been overlooked. Rather, political life has become ever more dominated by fear, outrage and mistrust, further fuelled by crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine. The advancement of populist discourses and conspiracy theories also illustrates the pressing requirement to comprehend and redefine the emotional aspects of political conduct and communication.
The ENCODE project fills this urgent gap by seeking to reveal the emotional aspects of politics in order to promote European democracy. It proposes the novel idea of affective pluralisation - a move away from polarising affective division towards emotional diversity and coexistence within political debate. ENCODE's main goal is to decode the dynamics between emotions, values, identities, and behaviour, and to re-encode this understanding into democratic narratives and policy-making approaches that strengthen trust, empathy, and democratic resilience.
To do this, ENCODE takes a multidisciplinary and multi-methodological stance that brings together knowledge from social sciences and humanities disciplines such as political science, sociology, philosophy, psychology and behavioural science. It employs an extensive methodological triangulation: sentiment analysis of social media data, biometric measurements (e.g. face-tracking), in-depth interviews, behavioural experiments, panel surveys and citizen innovation labs. These are applied in six European countries (including EU candidate countries) to have geographical and cultural diversity.
