Units

Center for the Study of Politics

The Cevipol (Centre d'Etude de la Vie Politique) is a research center of the Philosophy and Social Sciences Department of the Université libre de Bruxelles. It specializes in political sociology and comparative politics.  Research within the Cevipol focuses on political life, institutions, actors, and the norms and resources of democratic systems. The processes of action, mobilisation, and legitimation are examined with both qualitative and quantitative methods, from a contemporary perspective that takes into account the long view.  While consistently opening fresh empirical debates, the Cevipol updates traditional themes of political science: the distribution of power and resources among social groups, the different forms of authority, elite recruitment, conflicts between interests, identity or memory, and the weight of norms and values. 

Four thematic axes structure the intellectual identity of the Cevipol 
- Parties, Elections, and Representation
- European integration: redefining communities, sovereignties, and values in conflict
- Identities, societies, powers in comparison. A qualitative approach of political systems 
- Sport and Politics

Projetcs

PAIRDEM

''Party-Interest Group Relationships in Contemporary Democracies'':A common view in scholarly literature and public debate is that the relationship between parties and interest groups shapes the nature of democratic governance. Still, party-group relationships have been largely overlooked by political scientists to date and taken for granted across different countries, institutional make- ups, types of party systems, and sectors. The proposed research project will advance the state of the art in this field by seeking to systematically examine the nature, the shaping factors and the consequences for policy- making of party-group relationships in long-established democracies across the world.

RepResent - Representation and Democratic Resentment

Existing democracies are challenged by critics such as Trump, Brexiteers and populists claiming that democracy is not representative anymore. RepResent takes these claims serious by empirically examining the relationship between popular democratic resentment and the functioning of representation. Is representation failing? And, is democratic resentment driven by failing representation? Democratic representation consists of several dimensions, a substantive (policies), a procedural (institutions) and a symbolic dimension (feeling represented by representatives). Adequate representation entails there is congruence between the preferences of citizens and the actual policies, democratic procedures and representatives. RepResent is novel in the sense that it systematically compares citizens' views with elites' views, that it tackles all three dimensions at the same time to assess their individual contribution to democratic resentment, and that it does so in a dynamic over-time design. Concretely, RepResent examines the 2019 elections in Belgium, the campaign that precedes it and the term that follows. Its institutional structure makes Belgium a good, even a critical case. Using a large variety of methods all with a dynamic component and ranging from traditional panel surveys, over content analyses and experiments, to focus groups and interviews, RepResent aims to dig deep into one of the root causes of the widespread democratic resentment characterizing current politics.

J&P

The project intends to link three challenges (youth report to politics, social cohesion, digital revolution)

PPDB (Political Party Database)

The Political Party Database Project is a cross-national collaborative initiative that is currently working to establish an online, public, database as a central source for key information about political party organization, party resources, leadership selection, and political participation within political parties in many representative democracies.