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

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

To address the combined pressures of global challenges like climate change, economic instability, and disinformation, democratic societies must undergo significant transformations—transitioning to sustainable energy, reshaping urban areas, and adapting social safety nets. However, a troubling pattern has emerged across Europe: as governments tackle these pressures, the burdens of change often disrupt citizens’ lives, fuelling declining trust in institutions, increasing news avoidance, growing intolerance, and even political violence. This democratic erosion, in turn, makes addressing the original global stressors even more challenging, creating a negative feedback loop that persists despite extensive research on institutional crisis management. RESDEM addresses a key yet underexplored aspect of this dynamic: citizens’ democratic resilience. While scholarly attention in times of crisis typically focuses on state institutions, media, and elite actors, the critical role of citizens—how they adapt, engage, and sustain democratic practices when the pressures of societal change come to bear on their everyday lives—remains inadequately researched and conceptualised. RESDEM fills this gap by developing a theoretical framework of citizens’ democratic resilience through the lens of their public connection: how individuals orient themselves towards the world of shared concerns through media use, discursive engagement, and participation in social and informational networks. The project’s approach is distinctly citizen-centric and practice-oriented. Rather than treating resilience as an inherent trait of individuals, RESDEM examines it as patterned adjustments in citizens’ engagement with public life when faced with disruptions. These adjustments manifest in shifting dynamics of attention to public affairs, information-seeking, political discussion, trust in institutions and fellow citizens, and political participation. Crucially, RESDEM seeks to distinguish between engagement that maintains democratic foundations and engagement that undermines them. To ground this research empirically, RESDEM studies onshore wind turbine projects – a case where global environmental challenges materialise in citizens’ immediate environments, often sparking grassroots mobilisation that, while legitimate, can also fuel polarisation and illiberal sentiments. The project was originally designed as a comparative ethnographic study of wind power conflicts in Norway and Germany. Due to the shortened project duration (6 of 24 planned months), the fieldwork was concentrated on Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which proved to be a particularly rich case. Baden-Württemberg is Germany’s third-largest federal state but accounts for under 3% of the country’s installed wind power capacity. Recent federal legislation (the 2022 “Wind-an-Land-Gesetz”) requires 1.8% of the state’s land area to be allocated to wind parks by 2025, while the state government passed additional laws to accelerate approval processes, in some cases enabling project developers to bypass or significantly shorten public consultations. This combination of top-down pressure and localised decision-making has generated intense conflicts involving municipal councils, nature protection organisations, citizens’ initiatives on both sides, project developers, regional planning agencies, and ordinary citizens. A major theoretical development during the fellowship was a reframing of the project’s central concept. Engagement with the empirical material and with recent polarisation theory led to the concept of “anticipatory democratic resilience”, defined as practices aimed at maintaining participatory conditions before destructive polarisation consolidates. Wind power projects emerged as sites characterised by high political urgency, asymmetries of power, and material interventions into everyday environments, making them likely to produce polarisation as a communicative process that actively reshapes citizen participation. The question thus shifted from “how do citizens cope after disruption?” to “how do different actors work to preserve the conditions for democratic engagement in the first place?” RESDEM draws on an interdisciplinary foundation that integrates insights from communication studies, political science, urban sociology, and psychology. Communication studies provide tools for analysing media use and discourse; political science frameworks help interpret these patterns in terms of democratic participation; urban sociology’s focus on physical spaces and local infrastructure complements the digital emphasis of communication research; and psychological concepts of individual resilience are contextualised within broader sociological and political frameworks of community and democratic resilience. This integration of the social sciences and humanities is essential for understanding a phenomenon that is at once deeply personal and rooted in everyday media habits, conversations, and sense of belonging, as well as fundamentally political and governance-related. The project aligns with EU priorities for the European Green Deal (clean energy transition) and the New Push for European Democracy, and contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goals #7 (Affordable and Clean Energy), #13 (Climate Action), and #16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). By providing insight into how democratic participation can be sustained during contested energy transitions, RESDEM offers evidence relevant for designing more inclusive infrastructure planning processes and for understanding the communicative conditions under which citizens’ engagement with the green transition remains democratically functional.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union