Project description
Understanding the ideologies of African democracy movements
Movements opposing authoritarian regimes in Africa have been widely considered to be pro-democratic. The ERC-funded NEWREPUBLIC project is investigating how these movements conceptualise democracy. Through content analysis, it will assess whether they define democracy in reference to domination and power. Thereby, it will explore whether they articulate visions of democracy which mirror those of republican political philosophy. The project will explore the existence of a broader range of republican democracy movements and will survey public attitudes to show that republican beliefs are common. Additionally, it will examine how republican messages can challenge authoritarian regimes more effectively than liberal ones and assess the potential deterrent effect of emphasising violent regime domination on protest participation.
Objective
NEWREPUBLIC is about the democracy movements which struggle against authoritarian regimes, especially in Africa. It focuses on the ideas of these movements. Past research has read their ideas as pro-democratic, but this oversimplifies. My recent exploratory research argues that at least some of these movements express visions of democracy which resemble those of small-r republican political theory; they emphasise themes of domination and power. However, this research, and its implications, have gone untested and unverified. In NEWREPUBLIC, I will lead a postdoctoral and two doctoral researchers. We will develop and apply innovative, reliable and replicable methodologies which will test those implications. First, we will develop a content analysis to distinguish between republican, liberal and illiberal ideas. The doctoral researchers will apply this methodology to movement leaders’ speech transcripts in three countries: Cameroon, Tanzania and Uganda. I expect to demonstrate with rigour that there is a set of republican democracy movements which is wider than recognised hitherto. Second, the postdoctoral researcher and I will develop questions designed to distinguish between republican, liberal and illiberal attitudes and place them in surveys in the same three countries. I expect to show that republican attitudes are common. This will reveal that these movements’ ideologies are reflected in public opinion. Third, through survey experiments, I expect to find that: (1) republican messages delegitimise authoritarian regimes more than liberal ones do; and (2) that if republican messages foreground violent regime domination, they also inadvertently deter protest participation. These findings will have urgent implications for how democracy movements shape their messages. I will impart these findings to those movements in two policy seminars as part of the impact plan. In sum, I will radically change how these movements and the ideas at their core are understood.
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.
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.
- social sciences political sciences government systems democracy
- social sciences sociology ideologies
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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)
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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)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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BN1 9RH BRIGHTON
United Kingdom
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