POPBACK: Populist Backlash, Democratic Backsliding, and the Crisis of the Rule of Law in the European Union

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This project aims to inform strategies to increase democratic resilience bystudying the mechanisms “exclusionary populists” use to increase their power byundermining the Rule of Law in the areas of law, the economy, and the media.The project also seeks to identify the “coping strategies” societal actors use whenfaced with exclusionary populism. This topic is highly relevant to the call themesby investigating the politics and economics of threat (Theme 2 – work packages1 and 2); the democratisation of information (Theme 3 – WP3); and thechanging authority of and trust in institutions (Theme 5 – all WPs).Adopting an interdisciplinary approach spanning political economy, legal-,management-, and media studies, we compare Austria, Croatia, Germany,Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, all of which haveexperienced varying degrees of populist success.Besides high-impact publications, the findings of the project will inform concretesolutions for challenges to democratic governance. We collaborate with theCambridge Centre for Science and Policy, which will create five InternationalPolicy Fellowships for key stakeholders from the countries studied. These willconstitute channels for evidence-based input from world-leading academics toinform coping strategies and stimulate cross-country knowledge exchange.Furthermore, we seek to reach a broader non-academic audience bycollaborating with artists to stage a participatory performance in four cities toengage a dialogue with citizens from the countries we study. This project will beorganised into four WPs, focussing on legal changes (WP1), business andeconomics (WP2), media and communications (WP3), and impact (WP4).