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.