About the project
This project conceptualises and empirically tests how identities – broadly conceived – and how they interact with distributive concerns, such as unemployment, to support or undermine democratic resilience. Co-supervised between Politics and Geography, it will build on new methods in both to contribute to a broad understanding of (democratic) resilience.
This project seeks to understand how intersecting identities shape and influence democratic resilience with a focus on the UK. Democratic resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand, adapt to, or recover from shocks and stressors without losing democratic quality.
This project will explore how diverse identities—including national, local, and social dimensions—both bolster and potentially destabilize democratic norms. We will extend the scholarly work in Geography and Political Science to examine the role of imaginative geographies—how individuals perceive their area and nation in a global context—and their impact on democratic attitudes and behaviors.
Employing an interdisciplinary approach, the project aims to achieve three key objectives:
- developing a theoretical model for democratic resilience
- empirically testing how different identities generate support for democratic norms
- and exploring variations in political culture influenced by geographic imagination and subgroup characteristics such as education and region
Methods will include qualitative (interviews, focus groups) and quantitative (surveys, experiments), enabling you to develop the project along your own interests whilst obtaining a comprehensive methodological toolkit.
The impact will be to develop a conceptualisation and theorisation of ‘democratic resilience’, test it comprehensively in the UK, and to empirically test ‘imaginative geographies’. Outside of academia, there is potential to feed into how political actors can mobilise different identities to enhance democratic resilience.
Co-supervised between Politics and Geography, there are also active interdisciplinary and disciplinary research groups including:
- Centre for Democratic Futures
- Economic, Society, and Governance
- Public Opinion Research Southampton
