INCITE-DEM

INCITE-DEM's experienced Consortium aims to enhance inclusive participation and civic engagement while expanding democratic innovation and dynamic feedback mechanisms between citizens and institutional actors in representative democracies. Currently, “wicked problems” relating to ecological crises but also media developments and digital divides create unprecedented pressures on democracies. Next to related socio-economic challenges, we’re witnessing a decline in political trust and the formation of new societal cleavages. INCITE-DEM will offer a unique contribution to the future of democracy in Europe by harnessing historical and quantitative and qualitative social science research, agent-based modelling, design thinking, and advanced analytical methods for the purpose of expanding inclusive participation and engagement and fuelling democratic innovation. Furthermore, we will implement Democracy Labs (DLabs) in six countries, where citizens, representatives of democratic innovation initiatives, policymakers, and other stakeholders come together to co-create imaginaries of inclusive democratic innovations. The new solutions and democratic futures envisioned are the objects of design fiction products. All innovations co-created in the DLabs are then validated through a choice experiment survey with citizens and interactive fora with policymakers, to check their feasibility and the potential for implementation. Lastly, a set of policy roadmaps for a sustainable, inclusive, and innovative democracy in a world facing deep societal, technological and ecological transformations are produced and presented to a broad range of stakeholders at multiple levels of governance in Europe.

2023

2026