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SFU Political Science professor, Dr. Mark Pickup, is the successful recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant for his research project, ‘Norms-based Interventions to Support the Canadian Democratic Belief System’. This grant is given to support the excellence of emerging and established scholars, in the field of social sciences and humanities, with research initiatives of two to five years.  

According to Professor Pickup, “The overall goal of the proposed research is to address the erosion of democratic norms and the decline in democratic beliefs, an urgent problem that can lead to a loss of rights and freedoms, economic decline, increased inequality, and violent conflict. The challenge in reversing democratic backsliding, though, is that we lack an understanding of how democratic beliefs are supported by democratic norms and a unified framework for understanding the nature of the threat to democracy, and therefore to identify potential solutions.�

Even though there have been multitude of studies in political science and public policy that assess democratic health, most of these analyses generally focus on formal institutions, namely the electoral system. On the contrary, ‘Norms-based Interventions to Support the Canadian Democratic Belief System’ proposes to examine democratic norms within the mass electorate. “To do this work, our project brings together four researchers who work in political psychology to examine the relationship between norms and support for democratic principles in Canada, in order to develop and test norms-based interventions to mitigate the erosion of support for democracy.�

The SSHRC Insight Grant funded research will be conducted by the Complex Social Problems Research Space (CPRS) in the Department of Political Science. Led by professors, Mark Pickup, Laurel Weldon and Edana Beauvais, the CPRS team brings together policy practitioners and behavioural researchers, and utilize their expertise in public policy, behavioural science, and political communication.

To know more about Complex Social Problems Research Space, please visit here.