Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) is a new, evolving European research infrastructure that will enable better, more comprehensive, and innovative comparative democracy research on electoral democracies. MEDem is preparing an application for the next update of the ESFRI-Roadmap 2026.
These days, democracies in Europe and beyond are facing many challenges. The social sciences and humanities offer insights and contributions to the well-functioning of liberal democracies. As the scientific foundation for this, MEDem will bring together diverse types of data, link data sources and build standards as well as instruments for data collection and analysis. One of the main challenges is to collect, harmonise and integrate data from a diverse backgrounds of democratic systems, various electoral processes across different societies and languages. MEDem builds on broad interdisciplinary expertise to develop an infrastructure that supports researchers to tackle these challenges.