CureOrCurse is a Consolidator Grant ERC research project (2017), led by Jean-Benoit Pilet (Center for the Study of Politics, CEVIPOL, Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences)

While fewer and fewer Europeans trust their representative institutions, politics tend to multiply institutional reforms aimed at revitalizing representative democracy. The delegation of some political decision-making powers to selected citizens and to selected experts is one of such reforms. However, delegating political decision-making to selected experts/citizens empowers the non-elected, the opposite definition of representative democracy.

Jean-Benoit Pilet’s new research project will examine this paradox: are such reforms a cure or a curse for representative democracy? Will they boost citizens’ support for representative democracy, or will they deepen the gap with central institutions? The project will collect data across Europe in order to conduct a comprehensive inventory of all actual cases of empowerment of citizens and experts and the preferences of Europeans regarding these. A combination of online survey experiments and of panel surveys will also be conducted.

End of the project: 31/07/2023
 

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 772695).

Dates
Created on August 9, 2018