Luana Russo and Maarten Vink are part of an international consortium that has been awarded a European Commission Action Grant to work on the project “Fostering Awarness, Inclusion and Recognition of EU mobile citizens’ Political Rights” (FAIREU). The project aims to foster the successful inclusion of the EU mobile citizens in their host EU country’s civic and political life through the provision of a holist approach to tackling obstacles they face when exercising their political rights.
The consortium consists of academics from the European University Institute, Malmö University and Maastricht University, who have teamed up with the Brussels-based European Citizen Action Service (ECAS) and the Migration Policy Group (MPG). The Maastricht team will work closely together with researchers from Malmö University with the goal to establish, first of all, an inventory of available data on electoral participation in local elections by mobile EU citizens outside their own member state and, second, to provide in-depth analyses of a limited number of case studies where sufficiently detailed data are available.
Luana Russo, assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and expert in political behaviour and electoral geography, will join the Malmö research unit to work on the participation of EU nationals in municipal elections. Maarten Vink is professor at the Department of Political Science and currently Willy Brandt Guest Professor at Malmö University. The project was developed in the context of the Global Citizenship Observatory, of which Maarten is one of the co-directors.