REDIRECT: The REpresentative DIsconnect: diagnosis and strategies for RECTification

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The focus of REDIRECT is to study the current transformation of democratic polities in Europe, to realise whether and how their centres of gravity are shifting, and to improve our understanding of the “representative disconnect” – a multidimensional phenomenon of regression of the demos-kratos linkage involving institutional, behavioural and affective components. REDIRECT moves from the idea to study representative democracy in a comprehensive manner, connecting several relevant dimensions of analysis, in order to extract sustainable ideas and viable instruments to cope with the current problems of “democracy in flux”. These, in turn, will allow a parsimonious formulation of remedies, to be activated both at the institutional level (i.e. assuring a future to crucial “mediating bodies” of representatives democracy like parties, leaders, parliamentary institutions), and at the level of civil society. In parallel to a critical review of the theoretical reflection on representative democracy, an interdisciplinary and multi-level approach to several empirical dimensions of the phenomenon of representative disconnect will be offered, focusing on several topics: the crisis of representation, trust in institutions and political representatives, political personalization, political individualism, mass-élite congruence, social and social-media discontent. The long-term outcomes expected from the project mark the passage from the diagnosis to the strategies for rectification. Indeed, REDIRECT aims at providing a number of pragmatical recommendations to rearrange the demos-kratos relationship along a two way street intervention: the top-down way of institutional reforms (i.e., legislative and procedural innovation to ensure transparency and full information to citizens) and the bottom-up way of a stronger liaison between citizens and mediating bodies (i.e., remobilizing citizens via digitalization, diffusion of shared values such as social sustainability and civic education).