DEMOTEC - Democratising Territorial Cohesion: Experimenting with deliberative citizen engagement and participatory budgeting in European regional and urban policies

DEMOTEC investigates the role of participatory budgeting in fostering greater and more informed citizen participation in policy-making and in engaging citizens that feel disconnected from political and policy processes.

It focuses on citizen engagement in European regional and urban policies, combining in-depth research on participatory budgeting and mediated deliberation in the public sphere with real-world experiments.

DEMOTEC will apply innovative methods in seven urban authorities from across Europe, including experiments, deliberative polling, computational text analysis of big data, representative surveys, framing and discourse analysis and case studies.

It will provide novel theoretical and empirical findings on participatory budgeting and democratic decision-making, develop practical tools and capacity for practitioners, and produce timely policy recommendations at different government scales.

DEMOTEC consists of an interdisciplinary and well-integrated consortium of academic, media and citizen engagement partners with expertise in political science, regional and urban studies, sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and computer science.

The Consortium places strong emphasis on the co-creation of democratic innovation and knowledge with policymakers and communication with a variety of stakeholders throughout the project, including public authorities at all territorial levels, journalists, civil society organisations and the general public.