The bridging project "Against Elites, Against Outsiders: Sources of Democracy Critique, Immigration Critique, and Right-Wing Populism” (short: DIR) links the research units “Migration, Integration, Transnationalization” (Director: Ruud Koopmans) and “Democracy and Democratization” (Director: Wolfgang Merkel). Supported by the research units’ directors, Heiko Giebler and Susanne Veit are operationally leading the project.

Against the background of the current success of right-wing populist movements and parties in most Western democracies, the DIR project aims at exploring whether and why support for right-wing populism is associated with critical stances on democracy and with opposition against immigrants. The main goal of this project is to develop and test a process model of attitude formation and attitude change as well as to investigate whether democracy critique and immigration critique share common sources. More details regarding the research agenda of the project can be found here.