ENCODE - Unveiling emotional dimensions of politics to foster European democracy

ongoing

Despite emotions being a driver of political choices, building democratically meaningful emotional narratives in politics remains an uncharted territory. Hence the main venture of ENCODE is to decode the meanings of emotions and encode them to policy-making strategies aiming for a positive emotional turn, breaking the cycle of depolarisation. To meet this ambitious goal, ENCODE builds its conceptual frameworks arising from a novel concept of affective pluralisation, as opposed to affective polarisation. This term serves to frame empirical research carried out in 6 geographically diverse European countries, representing both EU member states and candidates. This study will span desk research, sentiment analysis, biometric research, in-depth interviews, experiments and panel survey. Such triangulation of research techniques ensures the accuracy and validity of the findings. These are further encoded into main outputs: catalogue of best practice to tackle disinformation in social media, emotional gap maps, validated survey questions and democratic resilience heatmaps. These outputs are not expected only to enhance current scientific framework, but also are planned to underpin the future emotional narratives co-designed by diverse groups of citizens in innovations labs and further validated by Delphi expert panels and vignette experiments. This bottom-up approach anchored in citizen science ensures that policy-making strategy are in first place created by citizens and only in the next step discussed by expert teams who will elaborate policy-making strategies, the roadmap for their implementation, alongside future foresight scenarios which will be disseminated widely across EU and EU wide community of 1000+ members. This strategy creates emotional bonds between ordinary citizens, increases trust in governance and supports better informed political decision-making and communication.