What happens when democracy faces violence as a recurring feature of political life? In this episode, we discuss the DANGER – Democracy, Anger, and Elite Response European Research Council (ERC) project with Principal Investigator, Nils-Christian Bormann. This EU-funded research project examines how European democracies responded to political violence, economic crisis, and rising extremism in the interwar period.
The conversation explores the project’s core questions, including how violence interacts with democratic stability and what role political elites play in moments of crisis. We also discuss the project’s mixed-methods approach, combining large-scale data collection with in-depth historical case studies, as well as innovative open-source datasets and visualisations. The episode highlights key early findings, most notably the relationship between local violence and support for extremist parties and reflects on what these historical patterns might tell us about the vulnerabilities of contemporary democracies.
Nils-Christian Bormann is a political scientist at Witten/Herdecke University. His research focuses on political instability, group-based inequalities, and conflict resolution. He is the Principal Investigator of the DANGER – Democracy, Anger, and Elite Response European Research Council (ERC) project.
The conversation was conducted by Alexandra Kardos. Alina Young edited the audio file.
