Trinity Research in Social Sciences, in partnership with its member schools and disciplines, has launched a weekly series "COVID-19 and a Changing Society". These will feature insights from across the social sciences from Trinity academics and international Social Scientists.

This is the fifth event in the series and is co-hosted with the Department of Political Science.

In Covid-19 and Challenges to Democracy, we will discuss the political implications of the Covid-19 pandemic given that it comes at a time of rising xenophobia and intolerance, thriving populist parties, decreased citizen confidence in democratic institutions, and democratic backsliding in some countries. What additional challenges to democracy has the Covid-19 outbreak brought? Are there any opportunities that may arise in terms of addressing some of these challenges?

The event will be chaired by Daphne Halikiopoulou who has published extensively in the fields of radical nationalism, the politics of exclusion, and the cultural and economic determinants of far right party support. Gizem Arikan will talk about how perceived threats influence public opinion towards strong leadership, prejudice and intolerance. Zoltan Fazekas (in collaboration with Jens Olav) will present results from a recent survey concerning the effects of the partial school opening in Denmark on families’ health, emotional well-being, government support, and economic situation. Constantine Boussalis will discuss how the news media have been covering the Covid-19 crisis and how politics plays a role in the coverage and its implications for misinformation and conspiracy theorizing. Roman Gabriel Olar will discuss the implications of the pandemic for authoritarian governance and human rights.

Daphne Halikiopoulou is Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading. Her research interests are nationalism, radical politics, and far right parties. She is author of Patterns of Secularization: Church, State and Nation in Greece and the Republic of Ireland (Ashgate 2011); co- editor of Nationalism and Globalisation: Conflicting or Complementary (Routledge 2011 with Sofia Vasilopoulou); and co-author of The Golden Dawn's Nationalist Solution: Explaining the rise of the far right in Greece (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, with Sofia Vasilopoulou). Dr Halikiopoulou is Vice President of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) and an editor of the journal Nations and Nationalism. Dr Halikiopoulou frequently appears on the media. Her blog posts and opinion pieces have appeared in the Independent, Newsweek, The Huffington Post, The Conversation, Open Democracy, La Revue Nouvelle (Belgium), Lifo (Greece), The Scotsman, The Times Higher Education, Belgium Express, EUROPP, the Greek Kathimerini, Counterpoint, Financial Times and the Dutch De Volkskrant.

Gizem Arikan is Assistant Professor of Political Psychology in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses on the effects of religiosity, values, and authoritarianism on political attitudes, including attitudes towards democracy, immigration, and redistribution. Dr Arikan’s works have appeared in top journals of the field including American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Political Psychology, and Political Behavior. She is the winner of Turkish Academy of Sciences 2015 Young Scientist Outstanding Achievement Award (GEBIP) and Science Academy Young Scientist Award 2016.

Zoltan Fezakas is Associate Professor of Business and Politics, with focus on quantitative methods in the Department of International Economics, Government and Business at the Copenhagen Business School. He obtained his PhD from the University of Vienna and has held visiting positions at Nuffield College, The Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), and GESIS- Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. His research is at the intersection of political psychology, political communication, and comparative politics and mostly applies quantitative text analysis techniques and hierarchical models. He has published widely in top journals including but not limited to American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, and Journal of Communication.

Constantine Boussalis is Assistant Professor in Environmental Politics and Quantitative Methods in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. His work focuses on climate change communication, specifically its origins and impact on public opinion and policymaking and uses computational methods to study political communication. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the project Extreme Identities: A Linguistic and Visual Analysis of European Far-Right Online Communities’ Politics of Identity funded by the European NORFACE network.

Roman Gabriel Olar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He received his Ph.D in Political Science from the Department of Government at the University of Essex. He is also a Research Fellow at the Michael Nicholson Centre for Conflict and Cooperation, University of Essex. His research focuses on the politics of authoritarian regimes, state repression, civil-military relations and democratization and has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Research & Politics, and Journal of Peace Research. His public scholarship on democracy and human rights can be found on the online magazine, Political Violence @ a Glance.

If you registered here on Eventbrite, but did not get an email from Zoom with the link to the session, you can register directly here:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-m5Ly9jLQbyAOBTsks5voA

If the event is sold out, we will be live streaming the webinar to Facebook where you can also view it from our page: facebook.com/TRiSSTCD