Providing and criticising reasons is indispensable to achieve sound public policy that commands the support of both citizens and stakeholders. This need is now widely acknowledged in the recent literature and key EU documents, which highlight the perils of populist discourse and policies.
APPLY improves the way European citizens understand, evaluate and contribute to public decision-making on such matters of common concern as climate change or energy policies.
Addressing this need from a multidisciplinary perspective on argumentation, the APPLY Action identifies gaps between the citizens’, policymakers’ and scholarly experts’ argumentation, and explores ways of treating them. This occurs through coordinated research activities in three main areas:
empirical: an argumentative analysis of EU policy documents and procedures, the media and citizens’ discourse results in an annotated pan-European database on institutional and citizens’ argumentation;
normative: a critical study of concepts and methods to measure the quality of arguments in public policies results in a unified theoretical and methodological framework to analyse and evaluate public policy argument;
prescriptive: the development of tools by which policymakers, citizens and various stakeholders engage in well-informed argumentative discussions.
(March 2019 – Februay 2023)
Management Committee member on behalf of Turkey: Önder Küçükural (onder.kucukural@ihu.edu.tr)