Motivation
We are in poly-crisis. Elections, economic performance, public health, and geopolitical stability have all become increasingly unpredictable. Democracies and their citizens are operating under conditions of widening uncertainty. In the social sciences, research has struggled to incorporate citizens’ expectations – and uncertainty – about the future into models of political attitudes and behavior. How citizens expect the future to unfold – economically, politically, and institutionally – shapes how they evaluate governments, participate politically, and support democratic systems in the present. Yet, without reliable ways to capture and understand the impact of these expectations, our understanding of democratic legitimacy remains incomplete.
Mission
To develop and apply a rigorous framework for measuring citizens’ subjective expectations about future political and economic outcomes, and to integrate these expectations into models of democratic system support at the national and European levels.
Vision
A more realistic and forward-looking understanding of democratic politics - one that treats citizens not as unidimensional evaluators of past performance but who can, and do, continuously anticipate, assess, and respond to uncertain futures. By systematically incorporating expectations and uncertainty into political analysis, Democracy in the Future program aims to improve both democratic theory and empirical models of political behavior.
Goals
- To overcome existing limitations in behavioral research to include and reliably assess individuals’ future expectations
- To establish individual expectations and uncertainty as core components of political behavior models by advancing methodological standards for measuring subjective beliefs.
- To merge novel data collection methodologies such as machine learning and the Quantitative Expectations Data (QED) survey methodology to better elicit individuals’ subjective probability distributions over future outcomes.
- To improve theory development by linking uncertainty to political attitudes, Support for national governments and democratic institutions, evaluations of democratic performance and legitimacy, and political participation, including voting and engagement
Target Audience
- Social science, behavioral researchers in and adjacent to academia.
- To aid policy-makers abilities to anticipate public reactions to future-oriented reforms and identifies conditions under which uncertainty undermines or stabilizes system support.
Your contribution supports:
- Behavioral research and methodological innovation.
- Advancing the integration of machine learning in social science research.
- International collaboration and networking.
- Project incubation for using new methodologies as the basis for new, joint research.
- Re-strengthening democracy
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