Resisting Authoritarian Past and Present and Contemporary Threats to Democracy: Families as Nurturers of Liberal Democratic Attitudes

SAFEGUARD is an innovative interdisciplinary project that integrates theoretical and methodological approaches from political science, sociology, developmental psychology, and history. The project aims at understanding how people develop supportive and opposing attitudes towards pluralist liberal democracies in democratic, authoritarian, and post-authoritarian contexts. The project’s primary focus is on overlooked, every-day practices of families over three generations and their role in the political attitude formation. Once modifiable family practices that shape negative attitudes towards pluralist democracies have been identified, the project will locate interventions that address these modifiable factors. The pilot will be run in the Czech Republic. It will include oral family histories that, together with the findings from the Push*Back*Lash project, will lay the foundation for a survey questionnaire development and validation to be conducted in Czech Republic. The findings from the seed pilot study will be used to scale up the project for a major early career grant application to be implemented at PLUS in 2026-2030.