NCCR Democracy

Movement Profile

The National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Democracy (http://www.nccr-democracy.uzh.ch/) is a multidisciplinary research program that examines the key challenges to democracy today and traces them to two major trends: globalisation and the growing influence of the media on politics (mediatization). These two trends pose significant challenges to the ways that established democracies have traditionally operated. At the same time, both trends provide new opportunities for both new and established democracies to adapt to changing conditions.

The NCCR Democracy’s principal aim is to propose designs to improve the quality of democracy and political decision-making processes. Its basic research questions are: How are established democracies changing under the conditions of globalisation and the mediatization of politics? And how can democracy be promoted horizontally – to non-democratic countries – and vertically – to supranational regimes like the EU? The NCCR Democracy aims to transfer the knowledge gained through its research to society and to promote its application in civil society and politics.

The NCCR Democracy research program is currently comprised of 60 researchers and 24 doctoral students from seven disciplines working at 20 partner institutions. Managed from the University of Zurich, the research program is an unprecedented disciplinary alliance between political science, media and communication sciences and other social science disciplines.

The NCCR Democracy was launched by the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs (EDI) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) in 2005. The research program is made up of five basic research modules and two projects charged explicitly with knowledge transfer into society. One module addresses the opportunities for and limits to the spread of democracy, while a second one concentrates on the challenges to political decision-making in consolidated democracies. Two modules investigate the process of “mediatization of politics” and its implications for the political process. A fifth module deals with the questions of how to measure and how to enhance the quality of democracy. Recently, the NCCR Democracy launched the Democracy Barometer, a tool for measuring the quality of democracy of established democracies in the world using 100 empirical indicators (http://www.democracybarometer.org).

Since 2005, social scientists have been working together for the NCCR Democracy in order to better understand how democracy is developing in our times. The NCCR Democracy research aims at publishing both in high-quality scientific articles and working papers. Additionally, the research program presents its results as various occasions such as internal and external international conferences and findings are regularly published on the web site.

OUR VISION OF AN INCLUSIVE EU

One of the NCCR Democracy’s main goals is to propose designs for political decision-making processes. The NCCR Democracy is a nonpartisan research program, but it shares the values and principles of constitutional government and the rule of law. Well-functioning democratic processes and institutions constitute the backbone of political legitimacy, social stability, economic growth and prosperity.

Inclusion entails an internal and an external component: in the context of the European Union, one can either focus on the relationship between the EU and its neighbouring countries or on the internal integration of the EU. The NCCR Democracy is interested in both. In terms of external inclusion, one project explicitly investigates how democracy is successfully promoted in the new Member States and under what conditions the EU can induce democratic chance in neighbouring countries. Analyzing and assessing the internal democratization of the EU, the respective NCCR Democracy projects start from the assumption that the elements of national democracy cannot be simply applied to supranational democracy. Rather, the transposition of democracy to the multilateral realm requires new types of institutional arrangements. Accordingly, the institutions determine how inclusive the EU is and can be.

The main institutional actors in the multilevel EU are Member State governments organised in the Council and supranational organisations, namely the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice. In particular the supranational institutions are likely to drive the democratisation of the EU and create spaces of transnational integration. Nevertheless, an inclusive EU can only be based on institutional mechanisms that represent the national political communities and individual citizens. Taking the demand for institutional representation of individuals seriously requires individual rights not only to be granted in their states of nationality but also in the transnational realm.

In an inclusive EU different conceptions of European identity and images of Europe integrate and coexist. Until now, only a small proportion of citizens identify themselves primarily as ‘European’; a single public sphere is missing and the definition of a European identity faces the problem of the integration of national identities. The process of identity construction in the EU is conflict-laden as different national identities persist with different images of Europe. One of the research questions evolving from this is to what extent an inclusive EU requires citizens to consider themselves as European citizens and if rights and possibilities for participation on several levels foster a multileveled identity understanding.

The NCCR Democracy supports the proposition that practices of discrimination and exclusion within the EU can only be overcome on the basis of democratic processes and appropriate institutions. Accordingly, an ideal type of democratic integration in the EU requires exclusively democratic membership structure and democratic decision-making on all levels. This is particularly pressing since national governments no longer have the degree of control that they once had and their decisions are increasingly affected by decisions made elsewhere. So the vision of an inclusive EU is understood as a multilevel system which preserves on the one hand the democratic competences of the Member States but takes on the other hand individual interests and rights seriously.