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ERC grant for project on minority governments

MINORITYRULE project by WiSo political scientist Sven-Oliver Proksch receives funding.

Großaufnahme von Professor Sven-Oliver Proksch in einer grünumrandeten Vignette, vor einer englischsprachigen Wortwolke politischer Begriffe

The Cologne political scientist Prof. Dr Sven-Oliver Proksch, from the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics (CCCP) of the WiSo Faculty and member of the cluster of excellence ECONtribute : Markets & Public Policy, receives the renowned ERC Consolidator Grant for his project "Democracy without Majorities: Political Representation under Minority Rule" (MINORITYRULE).

The Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council is one of the most important research awards worldwide. It supports innovative basic and frontier research. The MINORITYRULE project will be funded by the European Research Council for a period of five years with a total of €2 million.

The aim of the ERC Consolidator project MINORITYRULE is to investigate the impact of governance in minority governments on political representation. Political representation in this context refers to the connection between what citizens want and what politicians do.

Professor Proksch and his team will focus on three main issues in the project. First, they will examine how political polarisation develops in parliamentary debates and election campaigns in comparison to situations with majority governments. Secondly, the project will address the question of the extent to which minority governments react differently to changes in public opinion than majority governments when making decisions. And third, the project focuses on the citizen and investigates the perception of political decision-making and compromise among voters under minority governments compared to majority governments.

MINORITYRULE examines these issues in an internationally comparative way using a series of new data sets generated in the project. For this purpose, the project uses quantitative text analysis methods for political speeches in combination with survey experiments and panel surveys. The findings of the project should contribute to a better understanding of the institutional and political conditions under which minority governments can lead to successful representation.

Another ERC Consolidator Grant was granted to the mathematician Kathrin Bringmann, Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Cologne, for her project "(Mock) Modular Forms are Everywhere" (ModEv). The ModEv research project from the field of mathematics investigates modular forms and is funded for five years with a total of 1.9 million euros from the European Research Council.

Kathrin Bringmann has been working on number theory and modular forms for many years. The aim of the project "(Mock) Modular Forms are Everywhere" is to extend the boundaries and to predict, prove and understand modularity in various areas of mathematics, especially in moonlight, combinatorics, vertex algebras and enumerative geometry. This also has far-reaching implications for number theory. For this purpose, Kathrin Bringmann will use methods that originate from number theory, but also develop new approaches.

Sven-Oliver Proksch is Professor for European and Multilevel Politics at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics (CCCP) of the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of California in Los Angeles, USA, in 2008. From 2008 to 2013 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Mannheim. He was then Assistant and Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, until 2016. In January 2017 he was appointed to the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne. He is a member of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy. His research interests include political representation, democratic institutions, party politics, parliamentary debates, political text analysis and European politics.