Project description
When polarisation meets protest
To defend democratic rights and challenge governments, citizens often organise protests such as street demonstrations. However, the recent surge in mobilisation around the world has not always produced political change. The ERC-funded POLRES project examines this paradox. It focuses on affective polarisation, a growing emotional divide in which supporters of different political groups increasingly distrust and dislike one another. While such divisions can motivate people to join protests, they may also prevent movements from building broad support and achieving political change. Using global data, case studies and experiments, the project will analyse how polarisation shapes protest dynamics and government response. The findings will help identify strategies for civic movements operating in deeply divided societies.
Objective
This project explores how rising affective polarization shapes the trajectories of nonviolent resistance campaigns in contexts of democratic decline, and develops evidence-based strategies for promoting democracy from below even in polarized landscapes.
Across the globe, civilians are rallying for political change, taking to the streets at unprecedented numbers to resist anti-democratic government actions. Yet as mobilization has skyrocketed, its effectiveness globally has plummeted. To explain this paradox, POLRES theorizes and empirically investigates the role of affective polarization, arguing that polarization acts as a double-edged sword: while it increases mobilization into contentious action, it reduces its ability to effectively achieve political change. Building on these findings, a second goal of POLRES is to identify and empirically assess strategies to address this structural bind.
POLRES proposes a multi-method comparative design to advance its objectives. The first work package analyzes global trends and then conducts in-depth case studies using original qualitative and experimental data to assess relationships between polarization, mobilization, and campaign outcomes. The second work package examines how polarization shapes leader rhetoric regarding the protests, and then explores the impact of such rhetoric on mobilization and countermobilization. The third work package shifts from understanding present problems to mapping future pathways, experimentally assessing how different resistance tactics and frames shape campaign trajectories. By combining an original theoretical framework with rigorous and innovative empirical analysis, POLRES will shape academic discourse on the present and future of nonviolent resistance and inform public debates around effective avenues for grassroots opposition to democratic backsliding and autocratization.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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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.
- humanities languages and literature literature studies literary genres essays
- social sciences political sciences government systems democracy
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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)
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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
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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
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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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.
91904 JERUSALEM
Israel
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.