Could you share with us your journey to applying to the ERC Grant and how this award now supports your research?

My journey to applying for an ERC Grant began through an invitation rather than an individual plan. I was fortunate that three colleagues, Udit Bhatia (King’s College London), Bruno Leipold (LSE) and Pierre-Etienne Vandamme (UCLouvain), who work primarily in political theory and the history of political thought, felt that the project they had in mind would benefit from incorporating a comparative and empirically oriented perspective. When they shared the idea with me, I immediately accepted with great enthusiasm.

Our starting point is a shared concern with the limitations of representative government, which has become the dominant democratic model worldwide while narrowing our collective democratic imagination. Representative government rests on increasingly contested elitist premises, offers restricted avenues for citizen participation and often responds unequally to citizens’ preferences, reinforcing social and political inequalities. Through the POPGOV project, we aim to recover and analyse alternative visions and practices of “popular government” that seek to realise democratic ideals of autonomy and equality beyond elite rule.

The ERC Synergy Grant provides a truly unique opportunity to pursue this ambitious agenda over six years, with the resources to build a large, interdisciplinary research team. It enables us to combine historical, comparative and theoretical approaches in a genuinely global perspective, overcoming Western-centric biases and generating new insights into both past and contemporary experiments in democratic empowerment.

Would you encourage other researchers to apply to the ERC and what are some of the frameworks they should consider?

Absolutely yes, I would strongly encourage researchers to apply to the ERC, and particularly to consider the Synergy Grant, with both enthusiasm and realism. My experience is that Synergy only works when the project genuinely requires it. This is not about collaborating because it is pleasant (though that helps), but about formulating an ambitious research question that cannot be addressed by any individual researcher alone. The proposal must clearly show that the intellectual payoff depends on the combination of perspectives, methods and expertise within the team.

This requires careful attention to complementarity: skills and approaches should be mutually reinforcing rather than simply parallel. In a strong Synergy project, every member is essential; remove one and the project no longer works. Finally, team dynamics matter greatly. Empathy, trust and good energy are not soft extras but key conditions for sustaining long-term, demanding collaboration.

You will be teaching the class “Democracies in Context” next semester. What can students expect from this class?

Students can expect a class that approaches democracy not as a fixed model or a slogan, but as a valuable historical construction; one that has been built, contested, expanded and is today under significant pressure. Democracies in Context invites students to move beyond abstract ideals and examine how democratic systems emerge, function and sometimes unravel in concrete political settings.

Throughout the course, we will identify and debate the key drivers of democratisation and autocratisation, exploring why democracy advances in some contexts and retreats in others. We will engage with central issues shaping contemporary politics, including inequality, social protest, populism, polarisation and declining trust in institutions.

But the class is not only about diagnosing problems but also about discussing how democracies adapt, innovate and resist negative trends, through institutional reforms and participatory experiments. Importantly, we will take full advantage of Geneva’s unique international environment: the diverse backgrounds and perspectives of students are a key resource for rich, comparative and genuinely global classroom discussions.

How has your approach of teaching democracy changed over the years?

Over the years, my approach to teaching democracy has shifted significantly. I began with a more institutionalist perspective, focusing on formal rules, procedures and regimes as the main explanatory tools. While I still see institutions as essential, I now emphasise that they are a necessary – but by no means sufficient – condition for democratic stability and quality.

This shift has gone hand in hand with a more interdisciplinary approach, incorporating history, sociology, political economy, empirical case studies, as well as insights from the democratic evolution and my own experience in European and Latin American countries. Methodologically, I have become more aware of the limits of highly parsimonious models that rely on a small number of explanatory variables, which are often challenged by empirical evidence. For instance, Adam Przeworski famously argued that no democracy with a GDP per capita above $6,055 had ever collapsed; an idea he later revisited in light of the risks faced by the United States.

This does not mean abandoning models altogether. Rather, I use them as analytical tools to identify key dimensions and explore how institutions, social dynamics and contingency interact. Democracy, I tell students, is structured but never fully predictable.