RESilient DEMocracies: Rethinking Democratic Resilience through Citizens' Public Connection in Societies Under Pressure

ongoing

Democratic societies face a critical challenge: Addressing combined global pressures like climate change, economic instability, and disinformation while preserving democratic norms. As governments work to tackle these issues, the burden of change often disrupts citizens’ lives, leading to democratic erosion reflected in declining institutional trust, rising news avoidance, and growing intolerance. RESDEM addresses a key, yet poorly understood aspect of democracies’ ability to cope with global stressors: citizens’ democratic resilience. The project aims to develop a theoretical framework for understanding this resilience through the lens of public connection, offering a novel approach to resolving the tension between macro-level challenges and micro-level coping processes. Adopting a citizen-centric, practice approach, RESDEM examines democratic resilience as patterned adjustments in individuals’ engagement with public life when faced with disruptions. These manifest in shifting dynamics of attention to public affairs, information-seeking, political discussion, institutional trust, and political participation. RESDEM will conduct a comparative ethnographic study of onshore wind turbine projects in Norway and Germany, representing global issues materializing locally, often sparking grassroots mobilization that can challenge democratic norms. Norway and Germany, with strong institutions and high civic engagement, serve as “most likely” cases for democratic resilience. RESDEM aims to: 1) Identify key components of citizens’ democratic resilience, 2) Determine the interaction between individual resilience and local communication infrastructure, and 3) Identify factors fostering resilience through comparative analysis. The University of Bergen provides an ideal environment for this research, offering expertise in media studies, sustainable transformation and democratic theory.