Inequality and Direct Democraty in Europe

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Brigitte Geißel
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 388146621

The intended sub-project will investigate whether and how direct democratic procedures as an institutionalized, on legal equality based form of participation affects socio-economic, legal and political inequalities, relational equality (Rosanvallon) and (neo-)configurations of the political field. After the Hamburg school reform referendum in Germany, direct democratic processes are often considered as aggravating inequality. But is this actually true? Do direct democratic procedures stabilize or even deepen the mentioned dimensions of inequality? Hitherto existing studies focus predominantly on the comparisons of Swiss cantons or US-American states, examine inequality mainly one-dimensional and do hardly differentiate the effects of different direct democratic instruments. Also, the impact on political (re-)configuration is hardly scrutinized. The planned sub-project will close these research gaps based on a quantitative-comparative approach.The sub-project focuses mainly on European democracies during the period of 1990 until 2015. In contrast to the usual comparison of (more or less) direct democratic (federal) states, TP 2 will analyze the actual effects of concrete direct democratic procedures. It will select those procedures with probable effects on the described dimensions of inequality. The work program of the first funding period is divided into four phases: 1) Specification of hypotheses and development of the framework of analysis; 2) Data generation; 3) Evaluation of effects on the four dimensions of inequality as well as on political (neo-)configurations, 4) Case studies. Data generation will be based on existing datasets and databanks as far as possible. If sufficient data is not provided, different kinds of documents (non-digital and online material, platforms) and expert interviews are applied as data sources. On the one hand the analytical approach aims at testing hypotheses and on the other hand at refining and generating new hypotheses (exploratory).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants