Dr Spyros Kosmidis awarded John Fell OUP Research Fund Grant

Congratulations to Spyros Kosmidis, who has been awarded a grant from Oxford Universitys John Fell OUP Research Fund.

The funding will support Spyros’ research project, “The Radicalisation of Greek Politics: Violence, Extremism and Support for Democracy”.

Pundits in Greece and internationally have been expressing concerns about political violence in Greece yet only little is known about how the Greek public evaluates it and whether it is the direct consequence of austerity, the activation of anti-democratic dispositions or a short term phenomenon that will disappear with time. To evaluate this, the project aims to measure and analyse attitudes and beliefs related to democracy, the rule of law, political violence and the ideological dispositions of the Greek people. Furthermore, the survey results will be used to examine whether certain socioeconomic characteristics predict 1) extremism in Greek public opinion and 2) negative views about the democratic system and 3) favourable views about political violence. The methodology employed is quantitative and the research design will include nationally representative surveys to measure the key variables. Besides measurement and analyses, simple survey experiments will test whether Greeks use their ideologies as a perceptual screen to form attitudes about different acts of -political- violence. The empirical findings will shed light to the threatening radicalization of Greek politics and will offer insights as to how the Greek state can resolve this problem.

The project will start on 1 May 2013 and run until 30 April 2014.