About Microcode

The “Microfoundations of Collective Defence” (MICROCODE) project is funded by the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. It aims to initiate a new research agenda in the study of military alliances and collective defence that puts the relationship between public opinion and elite decision-making at the centre of the analysis.

Building on insights from experimental political science, international relations, sociology, and political psychology, the team behind this project aims to investigate the microfoundations of collective defence as a three-stage process guided by distinct yet interrelated research questions:

(1) How individuals in allied countries form their attitudes towards defending allies;

(2) How these attitudes aggregate to form public opinion shaped by cues from social peers, experts, media, and politicians;

(3) When and how public opinion influences views on collective defence among the decision-makers in allied states.

The ambition of the research team is to conduct an extensive, cross-national investigation in the key NATO member states, employing novel immersive mixed media (video, sound, pictures) survey experiments, elite interviews, focus groups, and other quantitative and qualitative methods.