Populism and Civic Engagement

“Populism and Civic Engagement” (PaCE) is an EU H2020 research project involving nine different institutions across Europe. It will run from Feb 2019 – Jan 2022.

Across Europe, there is a rise of political movements that claim to challenge liberal elites and speak for the ‘ordinary person’ – movements that can be loosely categorised as ‘populist’. Many of these movements have undesirable tendencies. PaCE, with others, aims to combat the negative tendencies of populist movements, to build upon the lessons of positive examples (such as Reykjavik), and hence play a part in constructing a firmer democratic and institutional foundation for the citizens of Europe.

PaCE will analyse, in detail, the type, growth and consequences of such movements in terms of their particular characteristics and context. From this, it will analyse the causes of these movements and their specific challenges to liberal democracy a possibilistic analysis to complement survey/statistical approaches. In particular, it will focus on transitions in these movements (especially changes in leadership) as well as how they relate to other kinds of movements and the liberal reaction. PaCE will propose responses to these challenges, developing risk-analyses for each kind of response, each kind of movement and the type of transition. For this, it will employ the agent-based simulation of political processes and attitudes to allow thorough risk analyses to be made. Throughout the project, it will engage with citizens and policy actors, especially groups under-represented in public affairs, face-face and via new forms of democratic participation appropriate to our digital age to help guide the project and to comment on its outputs.

It will develop new tools, based on machine-learning algorithms for identifying and tracking populist narratives and to aid online consultation. It will result in specific interventions aimed at:the public, politicians, activists and educators. It will look further into the future, developing new visions concerning how we could respond to populism and it will warn about longer-term trends.

Introduction to the PaCE Dashboard

The PaCE Dashboard allows us to reveal relative trends between different topics driving the discourse regarding populism, nativism and civic engagement. We use CommonCrawl, granting us the ability to scan web crawls from every year, 2013 to the present. We developed search criteria, testing then targeting hundreds of keywords; those keywords then got filtered through AI algorithms which we trained to recognize the different narrative topics.

Visit the PaCE Dashboard here: https://pace-dashboard.citizens.is/

For more information: https://popandce.eu/