MEDem
MEDem - MONITORING ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY
MEDem – MONITORING ELECTORAL DEMOCRACY
Building the Future of Democracy Research
Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) is a new, evolving European research infrastructure that will enable better, more comprehensive, and highly innovative comparative democracy research on electoral democracies by bringing together and linking data sources on the functioning of democracies, and by building standards and instruments for data collection and analysis.
MEDem in the European Research Landscape
Europe is the continent with the highest concentration of democratic countries, yet democracy research remains fragmented across data collections. The ESFRI Landscape Analysis 2024 highlights the need for a unified infrastructure for European Democracy Research, and MEDem is recognized as a key initiative to address this gap!
Why do we need MEDem?
The European landscape of democracy research data is as voluminous and rich as it is fragmented and scattered across multitudinous data resources, containing several different types of data objects. Such data objects include, for instance, election survey data, elite surveys, text data from media coverage or party communication, data about political institutions, or country-level data stemming from official statistics, and many more and were collected over numerous years, across various research teams, networks, projects, and countries. Due to digitization, which has made data collection more convenient, the volume and fragmentation of data are expected to increase in the years to come.
This fragmentation is a severe obstacle for open science and FAIR data (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), concerning both the existing and future volumes of data, and for generating novel research and new insights–particularly in the area of Democracy Research.
The ESFRI Landscape Analysis 2024 thus highlights the need for a unified infrastructure for European Democracy Research. This is why MEDem sets out to efficiently pool and interlink this massive amount of data, ensuring its widespread accessibility while generating significant added value. To achieve this ambitious goal, MEDem is, for one, going to host a search engine based on deep neural networks that allow users to discover all data objects – survey data, text data, country, and institutional data – that are relevant to their topic (satisfying its mandate for findability and accessibility) and, for another, going to harmonize and standardize democracy research data to make them linkable across time, countries, data objects, and data collections (satisfying its mandate for interoperability and reusability). This will strengthen researchers’ capabilities for exploring novel research problems as well as enhance their efficiency in data management when doing so by saving them from disproportionally large investments of time and resources.
Further, European democracies have faced different tides of challenges since their establishment, including, for example, institutional distrust, the spread of mis- and disinformation, decreasing voter turnout, and growing dissatisfaction with democratic processes. We are witnessing the onset of new challenges, with political communication, for example, ever more relying on social media and AI-based devices. That is why MEDem will—additionally to serving researchers’ needs—as well provide interested citizens, journalists, and policymakers with the newest insights and findings from Democracy Research and offer research data that is accessible to people without prior statistical training. In doing so, MEDem aims at counteracting misinformation, enhancing news reporting, and enabling citizens and policymakers alike to base their political decisions on solid grounds.
Our mission
MEDem aspires to become the dedicated European Research Infrastructure for Democracy Research that will serve as a catalyst for comprehensive, impactful, and innovative comparative research on democracies. MEDem will leverage the power of interconnected and harmonized data, unlocking vast amounts of research data in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and ensuring their interoperability. By harnessing this networked approach, MEDem will enable groundbreaking discoveries in Democracy Research that surpass the limitations of individual research groups or projects.
Operating within an open science and open data framework, MEDem unites and guides quantitative democracy research networks and researchers across countries, institutions, and disciplines, offering a framework for pre- and post-harmonization on a wide range of democracy research data that will lay the groundwork for large scale interoperability. It will provide a one-point entry that enables seamless integration, linking, and comprehensive analysis of all types of democracy research data, dealing with the intricacies of micro-level mechanisms to the broader meso- and macro-level determinants that shape democratic systems throughout Europe, while also securing resource efficiency.
Our vision
By connecting current (inter-)national research groups, infrastructures, and global networks, MEDem is conceptualized as a distributed European research infrastructure. The immediate goal of the infrastructure is to secure a position on the ESFRI Roadmap because of its crucial strategic scientific significance in European social and political research and European democracy.
MEDem members will be European countries. Their responsibilities include funding and developing data collection efforts for MEDem-related research in their country, contributing to the general MEDem operating expenses for the headquarters and regional service centers, as well as appointing a representative to the General Assembly. In turn, members will be at the forefront of a highly innovative and integrative social science infrastructure, creating new opportunities for research on electoral democracies, and co-deciding the direction of future work programs.
More info: https://www.medem.eu/
MEDem and Slovakia
The MEDem project as ESFRI project is still not approved. Its preparation has been going on for several years and has been gradually building up in the environment of European researchers in the field of democracy and electoral research since 2008. In 2022 the MEDem headquarter at Vienna University was established, and in April 2025 MEDem officially submitted its application to the European Commission for approving a full-fledged ESFRI research infrastructure.
The application is supported by 15 Member States and associated countries. The initiative is led by Austria, MEDem has already gained political support from Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Slovakia and Switzerland. Negotiations with other countries are ongoing.
The MEDem project is included among the upcoming ESFRI projects in the Slovak Republic in the area of Social and Cultural Innovation (Roadmap of Research Infrastructures - SK VI Roadmap 2020 – 2030, p. 59).
The Institute of European Studies and International Relations of Comenius University in Bratislava is participating in the preparation on behalf of the Slovak Republic (the national coordinator is doc. Oľga Gyárfášová, PhD) and Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Mgr. Ing. Miloslav Bahna, PhD).
For cooperation on the MEDem project, a Cooperation Agreement was signed and a National Consortium was established, it includes the following institutions:
The Institute of European Studies and International Relations of Comenius University; Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; Faculty of Arts, Comenius University; Institute of Political Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; Centre of Social and Psychological Sciences of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; Trnava University in Trnava; Pavol Jozef Šafárik University Košice, and the University of Prešov in Prešov.
In Slovakia almost 40 democracy scholars and researchers from several institutions across the country have already demonstrated their support for MEDem by signing the “Personal Expression of Endorsement”.