Sciences Po CEE is seeking to appoint a Junior Researcher to work with Prof. Laura Morales (the PI), from October 2023, in the Horizon Europe project ActEU (Towards a new era of representative democracy – Activating European Citizens’ Trust in Times of Crises and Polarization). Sciences Po is a partner in this project led by the Universities of Duisburg-Essen and of Saarland (Germany), and the Sciences Po team is led by Prof Morales at CEE, who is joined in the project by researchers at both CEE and CEVIPOF.
The ActEU project studies political trust and legitimacy in Europe using a new conceptual framework – the ActEU conceptual triangle. The project focuses on the interactions between citizens’ political attitudes, their political participation and the representation of their policy preferences with the aim of mapping and investigating the sources of the decline of political trust and legitimacy in Europe.
In addition to the overall conceptual triangle, ActEU considers the specific challenges posed by new controversies that are polarizing European societies as well as by the multi-level structure of the EU multi-level system of governance. Therefore, the project places specific emphasis on the different levels of the polity that are pertinent in the EU multi-level system as well as on major policy fields – migration, the environment, gender inequalities – around which European societies are highly polarized.
ActEU’s research methods range from descriptive large-N analyses of publicly available data sets (all EU member states + additional countries wherever necessary), qualitative focus group discussions, to quantitative survey experiments and web-scraping techniques for selected countries:
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ActEU provides deep insights for the following ten EU countries: Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and Spain (i.e., quantitative survey experiments and web scraped data);
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For the focus groups, the project opts for a smaller country selection (Czechia, France, Germany and Greece).
Based on the empirical findings, one of the major aims of ActEU is to develop a toolbox of remedial actions including two toolkits for (1) European, national, regional and local policymakers, and (2) civil society and the educational sector to (re-)activate citizens and to enhance trust in and legitimacy of representative democracy.
The project started in March 2023 and will run until February 2026. The Junior Researcher will join a team at Sciences Po formed by 7 senior researchers of CEE and CEVIPOF, 2 PhD researchers of CEE and a research engineer at CEE, as well as an international team formed by senior and junior researchers in 11 other universities and research organizations.
For more information on this vacancy, see the CEE’s website.
