ERC Project - DEPOLARIZE

We currently witness democratic backsliding around the world where political rights, civil liberties, and free and fair elections are under assault. At the same time, politics in many countries are increasingly characterized by hostility and distrust across partisan lines; a phenomenon called affective polarization. Could there be a causal link between the two? Which interventions could be deployed to reduce affective polarization?

DEPOLARIZE: Affective Polarization and Democratic Attitudes, funded by the European Research Council, addresses these puzzles around affective polarization with two objectives. First, it will identify reliable and generalizable experimental interventions to reduce affective polarization in multiple contexts. Second, it will establish any causal relationship between affective polarization and changes in democratic attitudes through novel empirical approaches.

DEPOLARIZE will achieve these goals by producing and analysing high-quality observational and experimental data from multiple waves of surveys in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and the US. These countries are selected for analyses because they have recently experienced democratic backsliding to different degrees, and they are also examples of high levels of affective polarization in society.

The project is led by Assoc. Prof. Selim Erdem Aytaç as the principal investigator and will be hosted at the Department of International Relations of Koç University from November 2023 to October 2028. You can reach the CORDIS page of the project here.