ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

The emergence of participatory governance has resulted in the delegation of governmental responsibilities to citizens. Individuals position themselves as voluntary mediators, or brokers, between the government and their fellow citizens. This research asks: what are the roles of such brokers in participatory urban governance, and how do they influence democratic governance? This study will investigate ethnographically how brokers position themselves in administrative schemes, and examine the formal and informal dimensions of their performance. It will analyse the practices, discourses and networks, both in and out of officially sanctioned channels and government institutions. The research approaches brokers as ‘assemblers’, connective agents who actively bring together different governmental and citizen actors, institutions and resources. The scholarly debate on brokerage within participatory governance is divided into two different arguments: first, an argument about neoliberal deregulation located in the Global North, which encourages the practices of active citizen-mediators, and second, a modernization argument in the Global South, which sees brokers as remnants of a clientelist political system. This research will combine these arguments to study settings in both the North and the South. It employs a comparative urbanism design to study four cities that are recognized as pioneers in democratic participatory governance, two in the North and two in the South: Rotterdam (NL), Manchester (UK), Cochabamba (Bolivia) and Recife (Brazil). This research builds upon theories from political anthropology, urban studies, citizenship studies and public administration to develop a new framework for analysing brokerage in participatory urban governance. Understanding how the formal and informal dimensions of participatory governance are entwined will contribute to our ability to theorize the conditions under which this type of governance can give rise to more democratic cities.

1 497 570 €

Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31

Social-science explanations for rising wage inequality have reached a dead end. Most economists argue that computerization has been primarily responsible, while on the other side of the argument are sociologists and political scientists who stress the role of political forces in the evolution process of wages. I would like to use my knowledge and experience to come up with an original theory on the complex dynamics between technology and politics in order to solve two unsettled questions regarding the role of computerization in rising wage inequality: First, how can computerization, which diffused simultaneously in rich countries, explain the divergent inequality trends in Europe and the United States? Second, what are the mechanisms behind the well-known observed positive correlation between computers and earnings? To answer the first question, I develop a new institutional agenda stating that politics, broadly defined, mitigates the effects of technological change on wages by stimulating norms of fair pay and equity. To answer the second question, I propose a truly novel perspective that conceptualizes the earnings advantage that derives from computerization around access to and control of information on the production process. Capitalizing on this new perspective, I develop a new approach to measuring computerization to capture the form of workers’ interaction with computers at work, and build a research strategy for analysing the effect of computerization on wages across countries and workplaces, and over time. This research project challenges the common understanding of technology’s role in producing economic inequality, and would thereby significantly impact all of the abovementioned disciplines, which are debating over the upswing in wage inequality, as well as public policy, which discusses what should be done to confront the resurgence of income inequality.

1 495 091 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

The rise of social media, coupled with intensifying demands for more transparency and democracy in world politics, brings new challenges to international diplomacy. State leaders and diplomats continue to react to traditional media, but now also attempt to present themselves proactively through tweets, public diplomacy and nation branding. These efforts often take place simultaneously and sometimes interfere directly with closed-door negotiations and its culture of restraint and secrecy. Yet the relationship between confidential diplomacy and public representation remains understudied. DIPLOFACE will develop a sociologically and anthropologically informed approach to studying how state leaders and diplomats manage their nation’s ‘faces’ in the information age. The project will explore the relationship and tensions between confidential diplomatic negotiations and publicly displayed interventions in various media, applying the micro-sociological concept of ‘face-work’. DIPLOFACE will analyse the complex interactional dynamics that shape the diplomatic techniques and strategies used to convey a nation’s ‘face’ or ‘image of self’. Such face-work is increasingly important for national leaders and diplomats who perform simultaneously on the ‘back-stage’ and the ‘front-stage’ of international relations. DIPLOFACE will identify, theorize and analyse the repertoire of face-saving, face-honouring and face-threatening practices that are employed in confidential negotiations and in public. DIPLOFACE advances our theoretical understanding of diplomacy in the 21st century significantly beyond existing International Relations and diplomatic theory. Combining participant observation, interviews and media analysis, DIPLOFACE will generate important new knowledge about the relationship between public and confidential multilateral negotiation, how state leaders and diplomats handle new media, and the role of face-saving and face-threatening strategies in international relations.

1 493 062 €

Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31

This project will explore how exposure to political violence in a civil conflict context impacts upon social, economic and political behavior of individuals. It has three legs. In the first leg I will analyze the association between political and domestic violence. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that those exposed to political violence are more likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence. In the second leg I will analyze whether exposure to political violence impacts upon economic behavior. Specifically, I will analyze the impact of exposure on risk, time and social preferences, savings behavior, employment, and earnings. Finally, in the third leg I will look into political behavior. Specifically, I will analyze the association between exposure to political violence and political participation and support, political tolerance, ideology, voting behavior, and party choice. The project will make use of a natural experiment setting that the institutional setup and the long-running civil conflict in Turkey create. Turkey has a mandatory military service system that requires each Turkish man, when he comes to age, to serve in the army for about a year. Those drafted are first subject to a basic training program and then, via a lottery, are randomly assigned to military bases all over the country to serve the rest of their terms. This means a young soldier can be sent to a military base in Eastern or Southeastern Turkey where a bloody armed conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the insurgent organization PKK has been going on since August 1984, and thus, can get actively involved in the armed conflict. This is a natural experiment setting that randomly exposes young Turkish males to political violence. In this project I aim to study whether and how that exposure impacts upon social, economic and political behavior of the exposed. To accomplish these goals, two independent, large-n survey studies will be designed and conducted in Turkey.

938 184 €

Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2022-03-31

Many European states have transferred decision-making powers regarding court administration and the career of a judge from political bodies to special organs in which judges have a major say. Judicial councils and other bodies of judicial self-government (JSG) spread particularly quickly during the European Union (EU) Accession Process. However, the effects of these bodies are not fully understood, as the traditional descriptive and normative scholarship is not able to capture them. JUDI-ARCH will fill this gap and address the implications of this phenomenon for the “new” as well as “old” EU member states. The central research question of JUDI-ARCH is: how the rise of JSG has changed the concept of separation of powers? More specifically, the JUDI-ARCH proposal consists of three interrelated research aims. The first is to assess the impact of JSG on public confidence in and the independence, accountability, transparency and legitimacy of the domestic judiciaries of 14 European states and the two European supranational courts, both the actual and the perceived. The second aim is to examine what impact the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have had on domestic judicial design and, vice versa, how has domestic judicial design affected the selection of judges of the ECtHR and the CJEU. The third overarching aim is to analyse the impact of JSG on the concept of separation of powers. A major innovation in our approach will be the integration of comparative legal perspective with sociological and political science approaches. We will conduct in-depth conceptual, qualitative and quantitative case studies on the impact of different models of JSG in both “new” and “old” EU Member States, including longitudinal quantitative analysis of the use of mechanisms of judicial independence and accountability before and after the creation of a JSG body and in-depth elite interviews.

1 499 625 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

This project focuses on the experience of two cohorts of children aged 10 and 13 at the beginning of the study and who are living in multi-local, post-separation families in Belgium, in France and in Italy, that is, families where the mother and the father are either divorced or separated, live in different households in the same country, and share the physical custody of their child(ren). A major goal of this project is to investigate the diversity of children’s experience of multi-local family life and identify their specific needs, through children’s own accounts of their lives. This means understanding if, and under what circumstances, children appropriate their multi-local lives and develop an habitus that incorporates the capacity to maintain social relations in a multi-local context and to appropriate mobility and virtual connectedness. The project combines three levels of analysis: the macro-level of policies, the meso-level of family environments (family resources, cultures and practices; and spatial contexts), and the micro-level of children’s lives, which consists in examining how children maintain their social and family relationships as they move with various temporalities between two households that are located in specific administrative territories and spatial entities. This means understanding how children’s interpersonal relationships and networks of significant others shape, and are re-shaped by their mobility in post-separation families; and the interconnections between geographical and virtual mobility. The study combines four methods: a policy analysis of multilocality, secondary data analysis of relevant databases, semi-structured interviews with children’s mothers and fathers, and a qualitative, in-depth study of the lived experiences of 90 children.

1 499 312 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

Most countries in the world are facing reform pressures to make their education systems more effective and responsive to the new challenges generated by the global economy. In this scenario, managerial policy ideas such as school autonomy and accountability, which aim to modernize public education and strengthen its performance, are spreading broadly. To date, a wide range of countries with different administrative traditions and levels of development have adopted school autonomy with accountability (SAWA) policies, whilst the most active international organizations in the education sector, like the OECD, are strongly promoting them globally. Constituting SAWA as a global model of education reform generates two main questions. First, why and how are SAWA policies disseminating globally, and to what extent does this reform model generate international policy convergence in education? Secondly, how and under what particular contextual and institutional circumstances do SAWA policies work and for whom? The fact that existing scholarly research has achieved inconclusive and mixed findings concerning the SAWA effects on learning outcomes and equity makes this second question especially relevant. To address these gaps in existing literature, REFORMED develops a comprehensive research approach that scrutinizes the different, but mutually constitutive stages of global education policy, from the inception in global agendas stage to their operationalization and effects in multiple contexts. Specifically, the project analyzes how and why SAWA policies are being adopted and re-formulated by policy actors operating at different scales (from international bureaucrats to teachers), and inquires into the institutional frameworks and policy enactment processes that explain the different effects of SAWA at the school level. A robust and multi-scalar methodological strategy that combines quantitative and qualitative methods will contribute to advancing such an innovative approach.

1 002 307 €

Start date: 2016-07-01, End date: 2021-06-30

News industry is undergoing a major transition: Traditional news consumption is on the decline, while citizens increasingly turn their attention to social network sites (SNSs). To accommodate this trend, news industry has been incorporating SNSs into its platforms, changing news into a social product. The project will explore this process and reveal its implications for news production and audiences’ political behavior. I develop a new model anchored in network logic and involving three key actors in news creation and distribution: news organizations, which are adapting news production to the logic of sharing; news feeders – users who select and disseminate news stories, thereby serving as a bridge between their online followers and news organizations; and news feedees – individuals whose news consumption is limited to stories fetched for them by feeders in their SNSs. The model points to some long-term effects on individuals' political beliefs and behavior as a consequence of acting as feeders or feedees. Multiple innovative methods will be employed, some of which will be implemented in the field of media and political studies for the first time. The methods are mutually complementary, combining ‘big data’ analysis with small-N in-depth designs. To study news organizations, I will interview news editors and analyze traffic data juxtaposing it against content analysis. To study users’ behavior and identify feeders and feedees, I will conduct a laboratory observation in which surfing behavior and physiological attention indices will be measured unobtrusively. Long-term political effects will be tested using a combination of survey panel data and web-based behavioral data spanning a period of two years. The proposal is theoretically and empirically innovative and can impact future research by providing novel conceptualization of news distribution, consumption and influence, as well as by introducing a new methodological ‘golden standard’ to audience research.

1 499 044 €

Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31