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Movement mobilization has a significant impact on party politics, shaping the brands of political parties and their repertoires of action. Drawing on perspectives from political science and sociology, the project examines the role of movement brands in party politics. We aim to identify the types of parties that are more likely to adopt movement-like brands, to use contextual variation to determine the conditions that facilitate the emergence of movement brands, and to identify their consequences for public support and the mobilizing capacity of different party brands.

What are the driving forces and consequences of the politicization of immigration issues in European democracies? Immigration has been one of the key issues responsible for the emergence of a new “demarcation-integration” cleavage in Western Europe. While there is evidence that the radical populist right has been a driving force of this transformation, the political strategies, mechanisms and dynamics of this re-structuring of political conflict are still not sufficiently explored.

Recent crises in Europe have led to massive domestic political conflict and mobilization. From a cleavage perspective, it is important that the various contested issues, such as European integration and immigration, have not been articulated in isolation. By contrast, political actors have linked them to one another and often to a broader—usually populist—criticism of representative democracy.

The project aims to build and operate an interactive Observatory for Political Conflict in Electoral and Protest Politics in Europe (PolDem). The European University Institute (EUI) and the Center for Civil Society Research jointly run the project. It is coordinated by Swen Hutter and Hanspeter Kriesi. The aim is to provide scholars and the broader public with continuously updated data on Europe's most important issues and actors in electoral and protest politics.

The project analyzes the relationship between the electoral connection of citizens and parties and the structuring of political conflict in European elections. It aims at examining whether European elections have an independent structuring effect on political conflict and whether this effect has intensified in line with the increasing competencies of the European Parliament. The project assumes that European elections only have a mobilizing and legitimizing power the programmatic offers of political parties, the public debate over political conflicts in election campaigns, and voter preferences are tightly connected and linked to salient European issues. This presupposes that elections can structure political conflicts and channel them into the political system of the EU.

Civil society goes through periods of heightened mobilization. One such moment was the unprecedented support of refugees in the summer and fall of 2015 when thousands of people spontaneously became active in refugee support and took to the streets to demand more solidarity. Volunteers and activists founded welcome initiatives or became active in existing associations and groups. As with previous mobilization periods, the engagement waned the following year as people withdrew and organizations returned to their core work. At the same time, many people stayed. Despite great difficulties, they continued to refugees and advocate for their rights.