Voting Citizens and the Ethics of Democracy (VoiCED)
Funding agency: European Commission - European Research Executive Agency (REA) (project no. 836571)
Project period: 10/2019 - 09/2021
Funding amount: 185,000 EUR
Host institution: Centre for Political Research (CEVIPOF), Sciences Po Paris
Political scholars and intellectuals alike agree that today democracy undergoes major challenges and that we live under regimes that are in some relevant sense post-democratic. Among the worrying factors warranting this bleak analysis, one concerns how democratic citizens engage in politics. Complaints about citizens’ incompetence, malice and selfishness are as old as democratic institutions. However, in the last few years these complaints have been renewed and widely emphasised in the public discourse: citizens are considered ignorant and biased in a way that prevents them from fruitfully engaging in politics. If one looks at normative democratic theory for an answer, there are not many reasons for hope. In fact, most accounts have not only failed to take these concerns seriously, but also expected citizens to be endowed with crucial virtues, such as reasonableness or unfettered regard for the common good. What should we realistically expect of citizens?
The VoiCED project attempted to answer this question by providing a diversified theory of political obligation for citizens, political parties and representatives. The reason for this comprehensive approach is that each of these three actors plays a different but connected role in actual representative democracies. By scrutinising the triadic relation among these three agents of democratic politics, it is possible to see whether and how the democratic ideal of collective self-rule can be fulfilled.
Rethinking Elections: Voter Trust, Equality, and Democracy (REVoTED)
Funding agency: Italian Ministry of Universities and Research (project no. MSCA2024_0000027)
Project period: 07/2025 - 06/2028
Funding amount: 300,000 EUR
Host institution: Department of Social and Political Science, University of Milan
Elections are a staple of modern, representative democracy; as a matter of fact, they are often seen as its most democratic moment. Yet, even when they are believed to work properly, elections are increasingly charged with many deficiencies: Too many citizens desert them, those who do not are too incompetent to make rational and informed decisions, and, for some, elections are even inegalitarian because they confine lay citizens to the role of selectors of their own rulers. None of these charges are entirely new (they never are). But many seem to share the belief that while some time ago elections worked decently enough, things have now gotten so worse that a serious reform, or even replacement, of the institution is called for.
REVoTED is a project in normative democratic theory that builds on research on the ethics of voting pursued during the VoiCED project. It identifies three challenges (citizens’ incompetence, their failure to participate and electoral selection of political officeholders) that scholars and intellectuals have raised against elections, meant as a democratic mechanism of officeholder selection, characterised by voluntary, universal and equal suffrage, and aims to answer them by developing a normative theory of the democratic value of elections.