The Team behind
Principal investigator
Suthan Krishnarajan
Researcher
Tadeas Cely
Postdoc
Researcher
Melek Hilal Eroglu
Postdoc
An acute challenge in today’s Western democracies is how to design strategies to improve citizens’ democratic commitments. Yet, most previous efforts to bolster citizens’ democratic values – by providing them with elaborate facts, figures, and arguments – have generally failed.
The Advertising Democracy project (AdDem) argues that a successful intervention strategy should account for the fact that we live in an age when people face intensifying demands on their time and attention. Most do not want to spend precious time reading long, complex, democratic information from researchers and experts.
AdDem fills this gap and pioneers a new research agenda that redefines how we think about pro-democratic interventions in the 21st-century information environment. It examines whether democratic advertisements—ads that communicate the importance of democratic principles in an easily accessible manner—can improve citizens’ democratic commitment. The project will explore whether such democratic advertisements can strengthen citizens’ democratic values and, if so, determine the most effective design for these advertisements.
The biggest challenge of this project is convincing people about the idea of advertising democracy. Many instinctively feel that democracy cannot be conveyed through advertisements, believing it to be too complex and dignified for such a medium and doubting its capacity to effect profound value changes.
But why not?
The project is funded by a Sapere Aude Grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Survey analyses for the preliminary stages of the project are funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation.
