We are pleased to announce that our team successfully applied for the Horizon Europe project INTERFACED (2025-2027). Amidst growing protests, declining trust in democracy and science, and increasing societal inequalities exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, it investigates diverse forms of non-electoral political participation. At its core are the so-called interfaces 鈥� such as referendums, street protests, social media debates, petitions or citizen assemblies 鈥� through which citizens may engage in decision-making and governance within representative institutions.
The principal objective of INTERFACED is to analyse these participation interfaces, their democratic underpinnings, their role in mobilizing the least engaged and most disadvantaged groups, and factors driving participation. Based on the empirical findings, the project aims to propose policy recommendations to improve the relations between citizens and their governments and to enhance the accountability of governance structures.
The project's consortium comprises ten European countries and Tunesia, and it is led by the City University of London. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, INTERFACED employs a comprehensive methodology 鈥� including large-scale surveys, experiments, computational tools, ethnography, textual analysis, and comparative qualitative methods 鈥� to examine the country cases of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany (North-Western Group), Austria, Hungary and Romania (East-Central Group) as well as Spain, Italy and Tunesia (Southern Group) for the (post-)pandemic period of 2020-2025.
The Work Package of Frankfurt investigates the feed through from participation interfaces into the institutions of representative democracy. Prof. Dr. Claudius Wagemann engages as Principal Investigator and Anna Geyer as Research Associate.
