As of 15 December 2022, I will be the principal investigator of the research project entitled ‘Democracy 2.0 Scenarios. Towards a new alliance between demos and elites’. This project is being developed within the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage at the University of Udine, involving experts on democracy and digital media from all over Europe, and is funded by the European Union within the framework of the PNRR (Call for proposals “Youth reserachers”).
The aim of this research is to identify the changing dynamics of the relationship between elites and demos in current and future democracy, with a focus on the innovations enabled by new digital technologies, with the intention of exploring original solutions to counter the crisis of the democratic system. The analysis is conducted with the support of the Futures Studies method, integrating the Delphi method (to identify the influential factors acting on the field of our democracies) and the Scenario method (to outline the possible outcomes of the forces involved on future democracy).
We live in an era in which digital technologies increasingly permeate aspects of our daily lives, including our participation in democracy. This change has opened up new opportunities, but also presented unprecedented challenges. Having a critical understanding of how these dynamics affect the relationship between elites and demos is essential to ensure the resilience of democracy in an increasingly digitised world.
In the pages of the website I will disseminate some information about the development of the project, so that the results may be available to the entire citizenry and may make a small contribution to the debate on the future of democracy.