New European Research Infrastructure MEDem supported by over 800 researchers and institutions

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.

MEDem is designed as a distributed research infrastructure with service centers across Europe. The headquarters will be based in Vienna, Austria. MEDem has a strong backing in the research community and has reached more than 800 endorsement letters from individual researchers and research institutions in over 30 countries. Austria, under the coordination of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF), supports the application to the ESFRI-Roadmap, together with a growing number of Member States.

News: MEDem gains support from 800+ Democracy Scholars - Monitoring Electoral Democracy

Website: www.medem.eu