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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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CIDAPE  Climate, Inequality, and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions

START YEAR 2023

END YEAR 2026

SNS team: Manuela Caiani (principal investigator SNS), Ipek Demirsu, Nikolaos Saridakis, Mario Pianta.

 

CIDAPE is a groundbreaking project at the forefront of research on the complex interplay between citizen engagement, climate change, and social and economic inequalities. At its core lies the recognition that emotions play a fundamental role in political participation and communication. Understanding and responding to citizens’ emotional (re)actions – as set up by CIDAPE’s inquiry – are essential to achieving coordinated, democratic action. With a focus on the perceived and articulated emotions around climate and inequality, CIDAPE proposes a comprehensive, multi-methods approach and multidisciplinary analysis of the force of political emotions in European politics of climate change. The project’s WPs delve into emotions in the political sphere, media, everyday life, global-local entanglements, social movements, and citizen engagement showing how emotions shape people’s rational argumentation, engagement, and ultimately, who and what they care about. CIDAPE seeks to uncover the core mechanisms and processes at the heart of political action – at the policy, polity, and politics levels – and proposes participatory tools, policy instruments, and methodological guides to address these challenges. The project emphasizes that the climate crisis provides a unique opportunity to unite citizens across the political spectrum and that the success of coordinated democratic action will require high levels of public trust, strong institutions, and policies that resonate with citizens’ political emotions. the Consortium assembles experienced researchers from political science, sociology, linguistics, communication science, and international relations, and distinguished representatives from civil society across nine European countries. It has a strong dissemination strategy, aiming at diverse citizen groups at local, national, and supranational levels of democratic engagement.

 

Project partners:

1 (Coordinator) University of Vienna (UNIVIE) Austria

2 Charles University Prague (CUNI) Czechia

3 Metropolitan University Prague (MUP) Czechia

4 People in Need (PiN) Czechia

5 University of Tartu (UT) Estonia

6 Universität Bielefeld (UNIBI) Germany

7 Scuola Normale Superiore (SNS) Italy

8 Utrecht University (UU) Netherlands

9 University of Oslo (UOSLO) Norway

10 Slovak Academy of Sciences (SU SAV) Slovakia

11 Universidad de Valladolid (UdeVA) Spain

                                  

FUNDING

HORIZON-CL2-2023-DEMOCRACY-01-04

 

News

Publications

Edited Volume - 2026

Conspiracism and Political Conflict

Manuela Caiani, Marco Solinas, Hans-Jorg Trenz

Monograph - 2025

Free download for "Contentious Politics of Global Health Movements"

Donatella Della Porta, Stella Christou

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy

Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

Journal Article - 2025

Power resources, territory and labour conflicts in the logistic sector

Donatella Della Porta, Marco Antonelli