Research Report: PLEDGE Codebook v.1
Date: June 20, 2025
The PLEDGE project (pledgeproject.eu) has developed an interdisciplinary PLEDGE Codebook—a dynamic tool designed to help scholars and practitioners systematically investigate the emotional dynamics of grievance politics.
As a living document updated throughout the project’s duration, it provides a shared framework for identifying, interpreting, and comparing emotional expressions linked to political grievances across diverse political and cultural settings.
The PLEDGE Codebook supports qualitative and quantitative research. It serves as a conceptual and practical resource for examining how emotions drive—and sometimes inhibit—political engagement across European societies.
It offers detailed coding categories, indicators, illustrative examples, and usage guidelines. More specifically, beyond discrete emotion categories, the PLEDGE Codebook introduces two central emotional mechanisms: the Emotional Mechanism of Ressentiment (EMRes) and the Emotional Mechanism of Solidarity-Oriented Sharing (EMSoS), which help capture how emotions unfold, interact, and influence political behavior in the context of contemporary grievance politics.
Researchers can apply the Codebook to study emotions as inputs (initial triggers) or outputs (emotional outcomes) of grievance politics, while also accounting for deeper psychological dispositions (e.g., authoritarianism), identity dynamics, value systems, and socio-political contexts.
Research Report: PLEDGE Conceptual Framework v1
Date: June 20, 2025
The PLEDGE Conceptual Framework offers a theoretical foundation for understanding the emotional dynamics of grievance politics. It explores how emotions—triggered by perceived social or political injustices—shape political engagement, influencing both pro- and anti-democratic behaviours.
At the core of the PLEDGE Conceptual Framework are two key emotional mechanisms:
EMRes (Emotional Mechanism of Ressentiment): Linked to resentment, envy, and hostility, often fueling polarisation or reactionary politics.
EMSoS (Emotional Mechanism of Solidarity-Oriented Sharing): Encourages prosocial emotions like empathy and collective care, supporting solidarity and inclusive action.
Developed as a common language model, the PLEDGE Conceptual Framework is a living document, intended to bridge disciplines and offer consistent use of concepts across the PLEDGE research teams and beyond. It connects emotional processes with social, cultural, and political contexts, offering tools to analyze how grievances emerge, evolve, and translate into political action.
The framework defines key concepts—such as grievance politics and its emotional economy—and outlines the emotional, psychological, and societal dynamics behind them. It also aligns closely with the PLEDGE Codebook, ensuring that theoretical insights directly inform empirical research.
Together, the framework and codebook form the backbone of PLEDGE’s research strategy, enabling a deeper understanding of how emotions drive democratic engagement and disaffection.
Data Management Plan
Date: June 13, 2025
The PLEDGE project’s Data Management Plan (DMP) ensures comprehensive management of research data generated throughout its duration.
This DMP outlines the lifecycle of data collection, usage, storage, archiving, and sharing, with a specific focus on adhering to the EU’s open science principles to promote openness, transparency, and accessibility.
It will be regularly updated and reviewed to accommodate the project’s evolving needs and datasets. The DMP details the handling of both primary and secondary data within the project.
PLEDGE is committed to the FAIR data management principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-usability). Data will be stored and shared using the ZENODO data repository, ensuring long-term accessibility and compliance with open science mandates.
The DMP outlines specific roles and responsibilities for data management. PLEDGE guarantees the ethical processing of personal data, focusing on minimizing risks, ensuring privacy, and preventing unauthorized use. Measures include secure storage, pseudonymization, anonymization, and compliance with GDPR and national regulations.
Quality Assurance Plan
Date: June 11, 2025
This document outlines the Quality Assurance Plan for the PLEDGE project, establishing routines for quality assurance, implementation monitoring, and risk management. These procedures are essential to ensure the project’s successful outcomes.
The plan describes the overall goals, principles, processes, and monitoring conducted within the PLEDGE consortium. It outlines a bottom-up approach with a detailed description of shared responsibilities and platforms used for quality coordination.
Additionally, it identifies risks related to four main activities: project management, empirical studies, co-creation of democratic design, and exploitation of results.
For each risk, the plan details their likelihood, impact, and measures to mitigate them if they occur. The Project Coordinator will ensure that quality management, risk mitigation, and contingency measures are implemented as needed.
Report on Design Principles for Emotion Sensitive Policy Making
Date: May 6, 2025
PLEDGE brings theory and practice together and generates tools to promote effective policy-making and communication that will enhance emotionally intelligent and responsive democratic governance.
This report lays the foundations for such a democratic design approach. To map the existing knowledge about deliberative democratic innovations and emotions, it combines an explanatory review of the literature with semi-structured interviews with international practitioners and experts in the field.
In so doing, we establish and explore a new research agenda, with the potential to inform future initiatives that will enhance the link between citizens, policymakers and political elites through deliberative practices.
We identified a threefold relationship that emotions have with deliberative democratic innovations:
(i) emotions are (dis)incentives to participate and commit to deliberation;
(ii) emotions are features of deliberative practices; and
(iii) emotions are outcomes of deliberative practices.
This report discusses these three dimensions with eyes fixed on the development of emotion-sensitive democratic innovations, and reflects on practices that further the emotional mechanism of solidarity-oriented sharing to occur.
WP1. Extant Knowledge and First Needs Analysis PLEDGE State-of-the-Art
Date: March 27, 2025
This report synthesizes findings from the PLEDGE project, exploring how emotions—particularly resentment and the need for mattering—shape political dissatisfaction, populism, and polarization in democratic societies.
It highlights how neoliberalism, inequality, and declining trust in institutions fuel emotional disengagement and affective polarization.
The study suggests that combating these trends requires targeted interventions such as fostering intergroup empathy, countering misinformation, and strengthening inclusive public spaces to rebuild trust and democratic cohesion.
