Research project ECCO (Empowering Citizen COllectives in societal transitions) has currently 10 PhD positions open. Professor Tine De Moor will be the promotor of the PhD position: Identifying prosocial effects of participatory decision-making in citizen collectives. This trajectory investigates whether citizen collectives function as “schools for democracy.” It explores how participatory decision-making within citizen collectives influences members’ civic engagement beyond the collective, examining whether democratic practices in cooperatives foster broader pro-social and democratic tendencies in society.
The PhD candidate will study this in worker cooperatives and co-housing communities (eco-villages), using mixed methods to understand how different forms of democratic decision-making affect civic behavior. A key innovation is developing the “Civic Engagement Tool”—a serious game that captures behavioral data on participants’ decision-making abilities, cooperative tendencies, and civic engagement in dynamic, realistic scenarios.
Interested? Apply here!
What we expect:
- Conduct comparative research across different types of CCs
- Design and implement a serious game for data collection
- Analyze spillover effects of CC participation on broader societal engagement
- Collaborate with CC networks like LaNSCO
- Collaborate with other PhD researchers within the ECCO consortium
- Publish findings in academic journals and create practitioner-friendly outputs
Supervisors:
- Promotor: Prof. Dr. Tine De Moor (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
- Co-promotor: Prof. Dr. Lise Jans (University of Groningen)
Deadline: apply before February 15!