Moral Elites (MORALITES)

European Research Council Starting Grant: 

Moral Elites: The Historical Positioning of Civil Society Leaders in National Moral Economies (MORALITES)

It is widely recognised that civil society organisations (CSOs) have had a vast historical impact on political institutions, processes of democratisation, social policy, and economic regulations. Scholars have emphasised the active role of self-organised citizens as a corner stone of the functioning of the public sphere, the accumulation of civic mores, political infrastructure, and the provision of services and advocacy. At the same time, research has shown the centrality of elites are central in forging settlements and compromises on key societal issues, begging the question how civil society elites have historically been involved in shaping societal trajectories.

MORALITES analyses the historical role of the moral elites of civil society and their impact on moral economies in four countries: Italy, Poland, UK, and Denmark. The project theorises the moral elites of civil society as elites that have the civic, organisational, cultural, and social resources to influence moral economies’ norms regulating economic, political, and social relations. It shows civil society elites’ composition, integration, and reproduction in selected elite spheres of society as well as the timing and content of elite strategies of conflict or compromise and these strategies’ influence on national moral economies. 

The project focuses on critical and creative junctures in each of the four country cases. In these junctures, biographical data will be collected on key civil society elite individuals that will be analysed through structural-relational methods such as Multiple Correspondence Analysis to determine their position within their national field. These analyses will be integrated with topic modelling text analyses of programmatic texts by civil society leaders in order to determine these leaders’ position-takings. This in turn allows for at comparison of the four country contexts’ opportunity structures and how civil society leaders have acted as part of a moral elite in order to influence national moral economies.

The project is organized in five work packages – one for each country context and a cross-cutting work package focused on data, method, and analysis. 

The grant

The project is funded European Research Council Starting Grant (101114850 – MORALITES)

Project leader

For further information, please contact Assistant Professor Anders Sevelsted (ase.bhl@cbs.dk)