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The Project

"Forging Solidarity" is a project that analyzes how politicians, political parties, and interest groups explain the purpose of social policies and political engagement "in the interest of others." We try to understand how political explanations shape opinions about solidarity, the institutions that organize it, and the policies that demand it, as well as the forms of collective action that advance it. In short, we want to understand whether and how solidarity can be forged.

Our empirical focus is on political debates about the provision of health care, socio-ecological transformation, collective barganing agreements, digital platform work, pensions, and social investment through education. We develop the method of explanation analysis to identify and analyze the political explanations that different actors use in large bodies of texts. We conduct laboratory experiments and representative survey experiments that manipulate the explanations of different political actors for various social policies and forms of collective action, using the information gathered by text analysis. 

Project News

On November 24 and 25, 2023, we met for our third "November Workshop" ("Public policy, conflict, and political rhetoric") at the European University Institute (EUI). The workshop program is available here. 

On November 17 and 18, 2022, we met for a workshop at the European University Institute (EUI) - the "November workshop 2022: dynamics of policies, political rhetoric, and political competition." The workshop program is available here.

To kick off the project, we organized our first "November workshop" at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence on November 25-26, 2021.