Sven Oliver Proksch receives the renowned ERC Consolidator Grant for his project "Democracy without Majorities: Political Representation under Minority Rule" (MINORITYRULE).
The Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council is one of the most important research awards worldwide. It supports innovative basic and frontier research. The MINORITYRULE project will be funded by the European Research Council for a period of five years with a total of €2 million.
The aim of the ERC Consolidator project MINORITYRULE is to investigate the impact of governance in minority governments on political representation. Political representation in this context refers to the connection between what citizens want and what politicians do.
Professor Proksch and his team will focus on three main issues in the project. First, they will examine how political polarisation develops in parliamentary debates and election campaigns in comparison to situations with majority governments. Secondly, the project will address the question of the extent to which minority governments react differently to changes in public opinion than majority governments when making decisions. And third, the project focuses on the citizen and investigates the perception of political decision-making and compromise among voters under minority governments compared to majority governments.
MINORITYRULE examines these issues in an internationally comparative way using a series of new data sets generated in the project. For this purpose, the project uses quantitative text analysis methods for political speeches in combination with survey experiments and panel surveys. The findings of the project should contribute to a better understanding of the institutional and political conditions under which minority governments can lead to successful representation.
https://cccp.uni-koeln.de/de/team/core-faculty/prof-dr-sven-oliver-proksch
Further info to be available soon.