TWIN4DEM

Strengthening Democratic Resilience Through Digital Twins

The TWIN4DEM project will investigate the causes behind the backsliding of democracies. To do so, the project will develop, with the help of computational social sciences (CSS), the digital twins of four European democratic systems (Czechia, France, Hungary, the Netherlands) in order to test hypotheses.

This three-year project (2024-2027) is funded by the European Commission as part of the Horizon Europe framework (Research and Innovation Actions).

With the help of the digital twins of the four European democratic systems being studied, the TWIN4DEM project will delivers four major breakthroughs:

TWIN4DEM will develop a new agent-based conceptual model allowing to identify the causal pathways leading to executive aggrandisement – the excessive concentration of powers into national executives – and threatening rule-of-law institutions. This will allow the systematic identification and testing of new hypotheses on the multidimensional causes of democratic backslide.
TWIN4DEM will release new cross-cutting tools to process and aggregate textual and non-textual data more efficiently and in real-time in an open, FAIR and GDPR-compliant manner. TWIN4DEM tools will not only allow democracy researchers to process more effectively the abundance of data on political life but also to enhance the transparency and legitimacy of democratic decision-making.
Third, TWIN4DEM will simulate, together with national policy makers and civil society organizations, policy scenarios to prevent and react against democratic backslide. This will enhance the effectiveness of interventions aiming at shielding rule-of-law institutions against external and internal threats. As a result, European democracies will be more resilient.
Fourth, by formulating guidelines on scaling up the use of CSS in democracy research in a participatory, open and ethics-driven manner, TWIN4DEM will pave the way for using such methods in a way that empowers citizens and reinvigorates the quality of democratic governance.

ESPOL is leading Work Package 2 “Conceptualising pathways to executive aggrandissement”, which aims to develop the conceptual model of executive aggrandisement that will be simulated. The work encompasses the identification of decision-making rules about check and balances; the description and operationalisation of the preferences of agents who directly or indirectly impact such rules; and the selection of relevant policy scenarios to be simulated throughout the project.