Beyond the many victims of the Covid-19 pandemic, and beyond the upheavals observed during the health and social crisis it caused, all individuals risk being durably affected in their daily lives and social relationships by its consequences. The scientific ambition of the research is structured around a first central question: how has the health crisis affected, in the long term, the social relations between individuals, but also between them and the economic, social and political institutions they belong to? The second objective is to explore the links between these transformations of social relations on the one hand, some of which we assume will be lasting if not irreversible, and developments in a number of fundamental areas of social life on the other. For instance, how do the changes in professional practices and relations interact at work, particularly with the development of teleworking? Or, regarding cultural participation, will the current enstrangement from cultural facilities last, and can it be explained by the concentration of sociability on family relationships, to the detriment of friends? And what are the effects of these tightening and recomposition of social ties on the relationship to authority, the deterioration of which the 'yellow waistcoats' crisis had already highlighted? To answer these questions, PANELVICO will rely on a large-scale longitudinal survey, over a sufficiently long period of time, in order to observe these transformations by re-interviewing several times, by questionnaires and interviews, a panel of several thousand people surveyed since the first 2020 lockdown within the framework of an initial research currently underway, and then throughout the four years of the research.

FeedingBias aims to provide data and analytical tools for a better understanding of incidental exposure to news on social media and the engagement of individuals with news. Our objective is a) to understand the influence of users' socio-demographic characteristics, their political orientation and their level of algorithmic awareness on their exposure to news, and b) to measure the contribution of these exposure and engagement biases on the polarization of the modern public sphere. FeedingBias will be based on recruiting a large sample of social media users responding to a survey and collecting data on their use of Twitter, Youtube and Facebook. All data collected within the framework of FeedingBias will be processed in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR and the research design will be evaluated by the Review Board of University Grenoble Alpes.

Our project is dedicated to the study of the influence of Europeanization on women and migrants’ access to social rights and benefits in France and Germany. The specific articulation between forms of discriminations and compensation for inequalities is drastically affected by the European process in both countries. In our project, we conceive social citizenship (i) as a discourse on social cohesion, (ii) as a relationship between citizens’ participation, social protection and statutory norms, and (iii) as a relation to the multiscalar dimension of power. We use this concept as an innovative tool for the analysis of the dynamics of social rights and benefits since 1957. France and Germany showcase contrasting traditions of social citizenship, which are combined differently in the process of Europeanization. The French social citizenship tradition emphasizes the abstract notions of equality and universal social integration, which creates differences with respect to social status and specific policy targeting. The German one is based primarily upon the belonging to a cultural community. It operates mostly through delegation to intermediary groups and admits more disparity in a more decentralized political space. The dynamics of inequality and discrimination in the access to social rights will be considered in the case of women and migrants as both groups have historically been marginalized on the labour market and in the welfare state. Our project is organized in three steps. Firstly, based upon the available literature, we will conduct a historical analysis (i) of the problematization of access to social rights, (ii) legal codification, and (iii) the instrumentation of policy-making in regarding gender, migration, and ethnicity in France and Germany. Secondly, based on legal and administrative documents, we will summarize and assess the definition and regulation of access to social rights at the European level. Thirdly, we analyse the effects of Europeanization on the definition of social rights and benefits in both countries, specifically around the issue of access to social rights for both women and migrants. We will analyse these effects in the aftermath of the European anti-discrimination directives (2000) in particular. This project will contribute to advance the analysis of current transformations, convergences, and obstacles in terms of legal codification and policy instrumentation, which are aimed at addressing inequalities and combating discriminations. We will work on two specific policy domains: 1) access to social minimum income, and 2) access vocational training and career advancement.

Rising populism and polarization, coupled with declining democratic legitimacy, all point toward a crisis in European democracies. This crisis has a regional dimension: a political and perhaps cultural divide between rural and urban areas. The project examines whether and how urban-rural residency is related to divides in legitimacy beliefs, social identities, perceptions of injustice and threat, political and social attitudes and political behavior of European citizens. It explores “Democratic governance in a turbulent age” from different thematic angles. First, it deals with shifting identities and their consequences for democratic governance and political representation (theme 4). Stable cleavages only emerge when struggles for identity are accompanied by perceptions of social inequality and unfair resource distribution (theme 1). Second, it examines the role played by globalization: increasing rural-urban economic divides create social status threats which exacerbate rural-urban political divides (theme 2). The project will combine a broad comparative study of all European countries with an in-depth analysis of five established European democracies. The project will result in the provision of significant new evidence on rural-urban disparities in European politics, which will allow us to examine the consequences of – and cures for – the current crisis of democracy, thereby engaging both academic and policymaking audiences. The coordination of the project, setting of the agenda, and the timely delivery of work packages will be the responsibility of the Frankfurt team. In particular, the project will be coordinated by holding six internal workshops and using a shared cloud server.

Over the past decade, in Europe the rise of populist parties and the growing importance of climate issues on the public agenda have been increasingly well documented in the academic, media and political field. However, they are most often analysed separately. Some recent academic studies have sought to analyse the possible interactions between these two phenomena. Nevertheless, most of this work focuses on populist radical right parties (PRRPs) (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach 2022), which may be explained by an interest in understanding the drivers of climate scepticism. By contrast, and to provide new insights into the linkages between populist discourse and environmentalism, LeftPopEnv focuses on populist radical left parties (PRLPs). The project is timely as, in Europe, the rise and electoral breakthroughs of the radical left in the years 2010–2020 have been based on populist elements (March 2011), i.e., on a rhetoric (a) opposing the people to the elite, and (b) demanding a ‘radicalisation’ of democracy through the concept of popular sovereignty (Laclau 2005; Mudde 2004). The project applies a mixed-methods research design to the comparative study of five European political parties in four countries: Die Linke (The Left) in Germany; La France insoumise (Unbowed France, LFI) in France; Parti du travail de Belgique (Workers’ Party of Belgium, PTB) in Belgium; Podemos (We Can) then Sumar (Add Up) in Spain. The project will situate the discourses of these organisations within the national contexts in which they evolve (e.g., party competition with green parties, salience of environmental issues, ideology to which the party is attached) to show the similarities and differences of their environmental discourse. The project seeks to examine how the leaders and activists of left-wing populist parties address environmental issues and to analyse the extent to which their environmental discourse is framed in populist terms to understand how it differs from that of green parties. This will allow to question the relevance of the increasingly used concept of ‘environmental populism’ or ‘green populism’. It raises the question of the respective roles of populism as such and its host ideology in framing environmental issues, in link with recent research in the field of populism studies that has specifically called for a better distinction between populism and ‘what it travels with’ (Hunger and Paxton 2021). This comparative analysis, first of its kind, aims to transform our understanding of partisan environmental narratives. LeftPopEnv will provide the basis for a first theoretical framework for understanding the left-wing populism/environmentalism articulation at a time when, in Europe, some parties of the populist left have succeeded in taking power, and others are emerging as major opposition forces in their countries (Kriesi and Pappas 2016). It thus responds to key priorities of Horizon Europe: to investigate the green transition and climate action, with a special focus on populism. The project fits the SH2 Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems.