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INTERFACED investigates the diverse forms of political participation that have transpired since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the ways in which they have fed into (and/or have undermined) democratic politics and government. A focal point, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an opportunity to contribute to the destination Innovative Research on Democracy and Governance of the Work Programme and its cardinal goal to empower active and inclusive citizenship with a systematic research and dissemination programme on the transformation of political participation and its feedthrough into democratic politics.

The principal aim of INTERFACED therefore is to analyse participation interfaces, to evaluate the political participation they facilitate, the degree to which they enhance it, so as to propose policy strategies to improve relations between citizens and their governments and to enhance the accountability of governance structures. While pursuing this aim, in line with Article 2 of the Treaty of Lisbon that enshrines common values of non-discrimination, tolerance, solidarity and equality between women and men, INTERFACED seeks to account for the unequal impact of the long-lasting consequences of the pandemic and governmental responses to it on social groups marked by intersecting inequalities of gender, age, socioeconomic status, ethnicity or race.

INTERFACED examines participation interfaces connecting citizens, civil society and political representatives to address concerns arising from living together in a democratic community. We focus on participation interfaces because we are interested in the connections they facilitate. INTERFACED analyses participation interfaces where relations among institutional and civil society actors, their cultures of opposition, resilience or emancipation play out and proposes policy-relevant approaches to their recognition and utilisation as democratic channels that can increase accessibility, inclusiveness and involvement in democratic politics.

Work Package 7 (Frankfurt): WP 7 (Frankfurt) investigates how institutional responses to political participation developed and changed during and after the pandemic years. Across the various participation interfaces, it differentiates between different target topics of collective action: (a) challenging public measures related to public issues and crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, climate change; (b) questioning the legitimacy of the ruling elites, democratic institutions, and democratic processes; (c) questioning scientific facts and the role of science with regard to contemporary crises.

ProDem investigates how interactions between citizens, social movements, and a specific breed of political parties (so-called 'movement parties', della Porta et al 2017; Kitschelt 2006; Mosca and Quaranta 2017) influence democratic quality in Europe. We approach democratic quality from a citizens' perspective as the acquisition of political, civil, and social citizenship rights through democratic institutions and processes (della Porta 2016:8-9). The interplay among citizens, media, and political organisations is at the heart of our inquiry into democratic quality.

Since 2011 and in the wake of the European financial, economic, and migration crises, mass protests have engendered new social movements and political parties. This development has been interpreted in two main ways. Research into political culture describes the increase in protests as a consequence of long-term sociocultural change, leading to growing numbers of 'critical citizens' who question authority but remain committed to democratic values (Dalton and Welzel 2014; Norris 2011). Protesting therefore belongs to civic attitudes deeply rooted in European democracies (Klingemann 2014:139-140).

Researchers studying the 'quality of democracy' have developed a more ambivalent approach, regarding the spread of protests as symptomatic of democratic backsliding (Bermeo 2016; Foa and Mounk 2016; Krastev 2014). Dissatisfied with the performance of democracies, sizeable sections of the citizenry have protested by voting for populist parties, contributing to an erosion of liberal democratic standards (Pirro 2015). Some social movements and their populist party vehicles (e.g. Movimento 5 Stelle) have mobilised citizens by framing political conflicts as a confrontation between corrupt, unaccountable, foreign-controlled, mainstream media-supported elites and ordinary people (Mudde 2004) expressing their grievances on social media (Engesser et al. 2017; Neumayer 2016). Polarising worldviews, often coupled with nativist frames, tend to negate political pluralism and erode attachment to the norms underpinning liberal democracy (Mudde 2007; Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Activists have, however, also resorted to protest to resist illiberal policies (Dimitrova 2018; Fomina and Kucharczyk 2016).

ProDem comparatively assesses the medium- and long-term effects of this triple interaction between citizens, social movements, and movement parties on democratic quality in European democracies. We seek robust and innovative explanations for how social movements and movement parties, alongside shifting divisions in citizens' values, ideologies, and attitudes, have affected democratic quality in six European countries (Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and the UK) between the onset of a global wave of protests in 2011 and 2019. ProDem will generate new, timely insights from comparative analysis of democratic quality by combining concepts and methods from social movement studies, political behaviour and party politics, political culture, critical theory, media studies, and computational social science.

GDPR-compliance: The project collects data based on public profiles of political parties and social movements on social media platforms using publicly available information. This may include handles of users who interacted with these profiles.

The focus of the data set "Reform Monitor of Political Conflicts" (ReMoPo) created by Dr. Benedikt Bender is the question of political conflicts of organized interests. What are the positions of employers' associations, trade unions and political parties on labor market, social and family policy? How do they position themselves on protection against dismissal, fixed-term employment, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, KITA infrastructure or parental benefits? Can changes over time and / or variations within the organizations be shown, and how much do the positions on political parties differ? Do the organizations change their positions in times of crisis, such as the economic and financial crisis or the Corona pandemic?

To answer these questions empirically, documents (press releases and Twitter data) are analyzed and expert interviews are conducted. The ReMoPo dataset starts in 2000 and currently includes seven employers' associations, six trade unions and seven political parties. The dataset is used by Dr. Bender and his team in teaching and research, as well as by our students for term papers and theses.

In summary, from the analyses to date, support for welfare state policies varies by issue and can change as contexts change. Particularly in the topic of social investemnets, equal interests have been shown to explain welfare state development. This means that purely ideological factors of organization types per se (such as labor vs. capital) are not sufficient explanations but need to be complemented by pragmatic explanatory factors.

In perspective, the data set will be extended in two directions: On the one hand, the positions of the Acutere are to be analyzed in an EU country comparison, and on the other hand, a focus is also to be placed on the German states.