Representative democracies in Europe face demands for more democratic participation and more efficient and effective policy making at the same time coming from the populist and technocratic challenges, as well as simultaneous demands for regional devolution and supra-national integration. As a result, they have been under pressure to reform for some time. As a systematic and theoretically driven repository of such reforms is missing, the project aims to produce a dataset of reforms of representative institutions and processes aimed at enhancing both citizen inclusion and policy effectiveness. Based on a typology of areas of reforms (electoral systems, legislative procedures, participatory rights, legislative−executive relations, etc.), reforms are classified and linked to the dimensions of representation they target, such as inclusion, responsiveness, responsibility, accountability among others.
The dataset covers all member-states of the European Union as well as Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom up to 2022, and links up with data from a past endeavour at EUDO (the forerunner of EGPP), within the SIEPOL (Seclusion and Inclusion in the European Polity) project, directed by Peter Mair and Camille Bedock. The project, directed by Daniele Caramani, has received funding from the Research Council of the EUI.