Aims
The RELINK² Action will intensify existing networking efforts of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and countries in the EU and beyond, to address two problems:
(1) How can democracies regain legitimacy and rebuild the link between representative institutions and citizens using the benefits of digital technologies?
(2) How can political organisations connect with digitally marginalised but politically active groups (the elderly) and with digitally active but politically marginalised ones (young citizens)?
The RELINK² Action emerges against a backdrop of profound transformations in political engagement driven by the digital revolution, compounded by longstanding challenges of political distrust, disaffection, and declining representative legitimacy. Over the last two decades, political organisations—including parties, NGOs, advocacy groups, and trade unions – have increasingly adopted social media and online platforms to mobilise support, personalise messaging, and streamline internal operations. Yet scholarly evidence indicates that these digital transitions have not uniformly enhanced inclusivity or restored citizen – institution linkages. Instead, they often replicate offline inequalities, with implementation varying significantly across organisational types and national contexts.
Two groups remain simultaneously marginalised: digitally excluded populations (notably the elderly and residents of disadvantaged areas) and politically disenfranchised cohorts (in particular, young citizens aged 16–24). Despite extensive research into digital campaigning and online mobilisation, there is a critical lacuna regarding how political organisations’ broader digital strategies affect their capacity to re-establish horizontal linkage functions—both between citizens and institutions and intergenerationally—necessitating a coordinated, interdisciplinary framework to address this dual marginalisation.
In this regard, RELINK² aims to find answers to three research gaps: a) the main organisational consequences of the digital transformation and their impact on re-linkage strategies, b) effectiveness of digital transformations in re-connecting intermediary structures with society, c) implementation of political organisations’ re-linking strategies to marginalised groups based on responsible use of digital tools. This requires an interdisciplinary and coordinated analytical framework.
Objectives
The Action will tackle challenges through research coordination objectives. RELINK2 will provide new opportunities to strengthen the career development of specific target groups and disseminate knowledge to countries and political organisations with less capacity in the field of the Action.
The practical implication of the Action is to create impact beyond the network. RELINK2 will develop a strong cooperation with stakeholders to integrate a non-academic point of view, identify good practices, and prepare recommendations. The Action aims to meet its objectives through knowledge production and exchange with relevant stakeholders.
The overarching aim of RELINK² is to explore how digital technologies can be harnessed to rebuild democratic linkages by fostering secure, inclusive transformations within political organisations, with particular emphasis on reconnecting digitally and politically marginalised groups (i.e., the elderly and young citizens) and facilitating intergenerational exchange.
To this end, the Action articulates five Research Coordination Objectives:
- substantively improving academic knowledge on impacts of digital transition in political organisations;
- coordinating knowledge exchange among members with a focus on digital realities;
- reviewing inclusive, transparent, secure, and privacy-respecting digital strategies;
- strengthening methodological cooperation to deliver comparative, reliable data; and
- disseminating research outputs and promoting best practices to stakeholders and practitioners.
Complementing these are five Capacity-Building Objectives aimed at:
- developing a diverse, multidisciplinary research network;
- engaging a broad spectrum of stakeholders in co-defining challenges;
- producing evidence-based, co-created policy recommendations and tools;
- fostering gender-balanced career development, especially among young researchers and innovators (YRIs) from Inclusiveness Target Countries; and
- promoting a sustainable digital platform for ongoing academic-stakeholder collaboration.
Collectively, these objectives respond to identified research gaps—namely, the lack of systematic mapping of digitalisation’s organisational consequences, the uneven effectiveness of re-linkage strategies, and the absence of policy-oriented frameworks for scaling best practices across diverse European contexts.
Scientific Programme
The scientific programme of RELINK² is structured into four interdisciplinary Working Groups (WGs), each charged with addressing specific dimensions of the Action’s research agenda over its four-year duration.
WG1 (Theoretical Challenges) will develop a unified conceptual framework to map digitalisation across organisational structure, communication, participation, and financial dimensions, standardise terminology, and produce training materials for YRIs.
WG2 (Methodological Challenges) aims to transition from fragmented case studies to a mixed-methods, large-N empirical approach by co-designing mapping schemes, harmonising data collection tools (questionnaires, interviews, focus-group protocols), and building a shared secure data infrastructure.
WG3 (Empirical Analysis) will coordinate cross-national data gathering on digital practices, organisational impacts, and engagement patterns, culminating in at least eight joint scientific publications, comprehensive datasets, and usability reports on digital platforms.
Finally, WG4 (Engagement and Dissemination) will manage stakeholder identification and liaison, co-produce policy briefs and recommendations with civil society, regulatory bodies, and political organisations, and implement a multi-channel communication strategy (website, social media, newsletters) to ensure broad uptake of the Action’s outputs.
This integrated programme ensures both scientific rigour and practical relevance, driving impactful, evidence-based innovations in digital democratic practice.