Across Europe, a steady trend of democratic decline, or "de-democratisation", is reshaping the political landscape. Governments are restricting civil liberties, curtailing the independence of courts and media, and using both legal and informal tools to limit citizens' ability to organise and protest. At the same time, protest itself is changing: new movements are emerging, old ones are transforming, and the line between pro-democratic and anti-democratic mobilisation is becoming harder to draw.
Despite the scale and urgency of these developments, significant knowledge gaps remain. We do not yet have a clear, comparative picture of how de-democratisation processes affect protest culture: how they shape what people protest about, how they organise, what language they use, and how they are treated by authorities and media. Nor do we understand well how protest culture feeds back into the state of democracy itself: whether and how citizens' voices, expressed through collective action, reach the political agenda.
ProTest is a three-year Horizon Europe research project (2025-2027) that addresses these gaps directly. The project brings together research teams from eleven countries: Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Moldova, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, and Ukraine. Together, these countries represent three distinct types of democracy (consolidated, new, and developing), enabling comparative analysis of how different democratic contexts shape protest cultures and their relationship to political change.
The project has two core aims: to reveal whether and how ongoing de-democratisation processes affect patterns of protest culture across different types of democracy; and to trace whether and how changes in protest culture influence the state of democracy, with a particular focus on the inclusion of citizens' preferences in the political agenda. ProTest combines multiple research methods: historical desk research, qualitative content analysis of social media and mainstream media, biographical narrative interviews with activists, in-depth interviews with law enforcement agents and policymakers, focus groups with citizens across three generations, and network analysis of political actor relationships.
ProTest will produce new comparative knowledge on protest culture under democratic decline, and strengthen deliberative democracy through direct engagement with activists, policymakers, and citizens, and through practical outputs including an interactive map of actor-discourse networks and a series of policy recommendations.
