The European research infrastructure MEDem – Monitoring Electoral Democracy in Europe is supported by 15 Member States and Associated Countries in its application for the ESFRI-Roadmap 2026. Austria leads the initiative with support from Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Slovakia and Switzerland.
MEDem is a distributed research infrastructure that enables better, more comprehensive, and innovative research on democracies by harmonizing and linking data sources across different aspects of democracies. As the continent with the highest concentration of democratic countries, Europe holds a comparative advantage in democracy research. MEDem will contribute to strengthening this advantage, reinforcing Europe’s global leadership in the field. MEDem operates at the intersection of various social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines as well as data science.
“Especially at a time when democracies around the world are under pressure, reliable knowledge about democratic processes is needed. MEDem creates the scientific basis and enables entirely new approaches to democracy research,” emphasize Prof. Hajo Boomgaarden and Prof. Sylvia Kritzinger from the MEDem Steering Committee.
Specialized service centers are located at leading academic institutions throughout Europe – including the universities of Amsterdam (VU), Florence, Gothenburg, LUISS in Rome, Silesia, and Vienna, as well as the research institutes FORS in Lausanne and GESIS in Cologne. The headquarters are located at the University of Vienna. Together, these institutions are developing modern, AI-supported solutions for harmonizing and linking complex democracy data.
Over 30 European research networks have joined MEDem to feed their data into the infrastructure. The data ranges from surveys and political texts to core data on political systems. Furthermore, over 1000 researchers as well as more than 100 universities, institutes, faculties, and research societies have expressed their support for MEDem.