Big Ideas for Democracy

Register here Political Identity as a Feature of Democracy: Belonging, Rejection, and Absence  Political identities are often taken for granted as attachments to parties or ideological camps. Yet citizens differ profoundly in how much politics matters to who they are, in whether they define themselves through belonging or rejection, and in whether politics plays any […]

Register here When We Are Not in the Room:  Designing Feminist Institutional Change for Resilience and Reactivation  Feminist institutionalism has long shown that feminist institutional change is rarely one-shot, given the “genderedness” of organisations/institutions (Benschop & Verloo, 2006), the “nested newness” of reform efforts (Mackay, 2014), and multiple forms of resistance (Tildesley, Lombardo & Verge, 2022). Recent work argues that inclusive reforms tend to follow cycles of repetition through which […]

Register here The international norm of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: Navigating Inequality and Inclusion in Democracies under Pressure Bio Petra Ahrens is Academy of Finland Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on gender policies and politics in the European Union and its institutions, gender equality in Germany, gender-sensitive parliaments, and transnational civil society. Alongside […]

Register here Informational Autocracies and State-Sponsored Disinformation - On the Possibilities and Limits of Institutionalized Brainwashing Abstract In today’s information landscape, the rise of “spin dictatorships” or informational autocracies shows how state actors, economic elites, and digital platforms cooperate to sustain mass persuasion. Instead of relying mainly on repression, these regimes manage information, engineer public […]