Strengthening Democratic Resilience Through Digital Twins (TWIN4DEM)

Over the last decade, executive power grabs – also called executive aggrandisement – have driven a retreat of democracy raising concerns about Europe’s democratic resilience among scholars, policymakers and the public alike. Despite the profusion of data on many dimensions of democratic life, democracy researchers have not been able to identify the multidimensional causal pathways that trigger executive aggrandisement and weaken rule of law-based institutions. Methods traditionally used in democracy research simply cannot provide a comprehensive understanding of the complex and multidimensional causes of executive aggrandisement.

TWIN4DEM ambitions to scale up the use of Computational Social Sciences (CSS) in democracy research by bringing together scholars of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), CSS, computer scientists and democratic promotion stakeholders to jointly address one of the most crucial questions in democracy scholarship: what causes democracies to decline? Combining various advanced CSS methods (natural language processing; data aggregation and synthesising, and dynamic simulation models) allows to uncover the drivers and implications of executive aggrandisement in a more precise manner. By prototyping the first ever digital twins (DT) of four European democratic systems (Czechia, France, Hungary and the Netherlands), TWIN4DEM develops cross-cutting tools to process and aggregate textual and non-textual data more efficiently and accurately through the simulation of policy scenarios in a participatory and inclusive environment.