ProDem - Protest and Democratic Quality

ProDem was an interdisciplinary project funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung. It aimed to comparatively assess the medium- and long-term effects of the triple interaction between citizens, social movements and movement parties on European countries.

We wanted to explain how social movements and movement parties together with a realignment of citizens’ values and attitudes have affected democratic quality in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and the UK. We approached democratic quality from a citizens’ perspective as the acquisition of political, civil, and social citizenship rights through democratic institutions and processes.

The project developed new, timely insights by combining concepts from social movement studies, political behaviour and party politics, political culture, critical theory, media studies and policy analysis. It used an original cross-national multi-method research design bridging qualitative and quantitative approaches with computational, set-theoretic and critical methods to map contextual conditions, cross-national, cross-issue and social network patterns that could enhance democratic quality. ProDem generated and disseminated policy recommendations that could inform public deliberations and propose evidence-based institutional responses to the socio-economic, cultural and ultimately democratic political integration of citizens, social movements and movement parties.