On 30 March 2023, the European Research Council announced the winners of its 2022 Advanced Grants competition. Among the proposals selected for funding is EUI Professor Daniele Caramani's project GLOBAL that focuses on the shape of political, economic, and cultural divisions across the world.
The GLOBAL project aims to start on 1 July 2023 and will last for five years. It will analyse the divisions in world politics and seek to understand whether conflicts are shaped territorially or according to socio-economic and cultural groups across world regions.
"The project analyses how divisions between world regions (core−periphery, North−South, or civilisational contrasts) increasingly give way to divisions across world regions that oppose groups, such as classes, education levels, generations or genders irrespective of location", explains Caramani.
In order to do so, GLOBAL will conduct a long-term empirical analysis from the 19th century to the present at the level of citizens, political actors, and institutions. The project, which will be hosted at the European Governance and Politics Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre, plans to use a variety of research strategies: statistical, geographical, scaling, and network methods with electoral, socio-economic, roll-call, text, survey and organisational data. This mix will enable the research team to combine a comparative approach and detect convergence and divergence between world regions, and a supranational approach to detect global integration or disintegration.
"GLOBAL is a macro project across space and time that is concerned with divisions over political, cultural, and socio-economic resources that shape the globe", added Caramani.
As principal investigator of the project, Caramani will plan to author a book on the globalisation of politics that follows the volumes on the The Nationalization of Politics and The Europeanisation of Politics (both published in Cambridge University Press), as well as a special issue, an edited volume, and various journal articles together with the research team.
ERC Advance Grants are for investigators who have a track-record of significant research achievements in the last 10 years to support cutting-edge and ambitious research ideas.
Daniele Caramani is Ernst B. Haas Chair in European Governance and Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre, where he directs the European Governance and Politics Programme. He is on leave from the University of Zurich where he holds the Chair of Comparative Politics. He holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Geneva and a PhD from the European University Institute.