Thursday seminar: Raul Magni-Berton & Clara Egger + Yasemin Uluşahin

Book launch: Direct Democracy Institutions in a Globalized World. The New Democratic Frontier

by Raul Magni-Berton and Clara Egger

This book titled Direct Democracy Institutions in a Globalized World. The New Democratic Frontier challenges the idea that representative democracy is the pinnacle of political development and redefines its conceptual boundaries. The authors argue that when citizens can directly initiate and veto constitutional changes, democracy enters a new phase – direct democracy – as a distinct political system. Using original data and comparisons across six countries and 15 U.S. states, the book shows that direct democracies foster legitimacy, stability and engagement. Combining historical, institutional and empirical insights, the book reframes democracy’s future and offers a timely guide for expanding citizen power in the 21st century. This book is of key interest to scholars and students of democratic regimes, reform and democratization and, more broadly, comparative politics. 

Bio

Raul Magni-Berton est professeur de sciences politiques à l’Université catholique de Lille, et titulaire de la Chaire Démocratie directe comparée. Il travaille dans le champs de l’économie politique et la politique comparée, dans des thématiques autour de la démocratie, la violence politique, les droits politiques. Récemment, ses recherches et son activité au sein de la société civile se sont concentrées sur la démocratie directe et la subsidiarité ascendante.   

Clara Egger is Assistant Professor of Global Governance at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where she works on crisis governance and (de) democratization processes. She coordinates the Horizon Europe project TWIN4DEM, which explores how computational methods can help understand and safeguard democratic institutions. Her research combines comparative work on direct democracy with research on international and crisis governance, using an international political economy approach. 

Whose Voice to Believe When Authorities Disagree? Misinformation, Populism and Conspiracy Mentality 

by Yasemin Uluşahin

What happens when authorities tell us different things on critical issues such as our health? Today, there is rarely a single voice telling citizens what to do and how to react. More often, multiple voices with claims to authority enter the public sphere at once, each presenting itself as acting in the public interest, and citizens must decide whom to trust. This is what happened in September 2025, when President Trump stated at a White House press conference that Tylenol (acetaminophen) use during pregnancy is linked to autism, a claim quickly contested by obstetricians. In Study 1 (N = 444), US adults placed the two voices, Trump and scientists, relative to one another, which we call relative categorisation. In two pre-registered experiments, we tried to shift that placement by changing how distant scientists seemed from ordinary people (Study 2, N = 382) or the institutional setting they spoke from (Study 3, N = 188). Relative categorisation was the strongest predictor of belief that Tylenol is safe, explaining close to half the variance (R² = .48, .44 and .42), regardless of political orientation or 2024 vote. Populist attitudes were common across the political spectrum but predicted belief only weakly (R² = .03), and most of the link with conspiracy mentality disappeared once categorisation was taken into account. Our manipulations made people feel closer to scientists, but trust and belief did not change. Populism and conspiracy thinking both describe a contest between the people and the elite, yet they do not say who belongs in each camp. Our findings suggest that who citizens categorise as part of “the elite” is central to whom they choose to believe. 

Bio

Yasemin Uluşahin is a FNRS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles, affiliated with the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology (CeSCuP). She received her PhD in Social and Political Psychology from the University of St Andrews.Her research examines how social identities and shared representations shape belief formation and political engagement. She is particularly interested in intergroup relations, leadership processes, conspiracy beliefs, and populism. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she investigates how group dynamics and identity leadership influence trust in information and engagement with political discourse.