Photo: Image generated by OpenAI’s GPT-5 (DALL·E), 2025

Politics, Legitimacy and Representation in Strained Societies (POLARIS) is an interdisciplinary research group exploring the nature of contemporary democratic crises, with a focus on the institutional, political, and epistemic challenges to traditional forms of representation. The group investigates how transformations in political legitimacy and epistemic authority reshape the capacity of democratic systems to represent increasingly segregated and fragmented publics, inhabiting societies undergoing processes of polarization.

POLARIS brings together scholars from political science, sociology, philosophy, history, and other related fields to analyze the erosion of intermediary bodies and of accountability mechanisms in general, the decline of public trust, and the reconfiguration of political authority in an age of uncertainty. Its members will examine the erosion of ‘the center’, and how insurgent political movements mobilize “alternative expertise” to challenge traditional forms of governance.

By combining theoretical reflection with empirical research, POLARIS seeks to map the dynamics that strain contemporary democracies and to explore possible avenues for renewal and resilience through normative prescriptions and institutional design proposals, including democratic innovations. The group aims to foster dialogue between disciplines, connect academic inquiry with public debate, and contribute to a deeper understanding of what it means to represent and to be represented under conditions of democratic fragility.