CfA (closed): Summer School on the Computational Social Science of Democratic Debate › view all

Junior researchers are invited to apply for participation in the Summer School on the Computational Social Science of Democratic Debate. Women are especially encouraged to apply!

The summer school is conceptualized as a research incubator bringing together experts in computational social sciences, experts on the topic, and junior scholars to advance research by using data-driven modeling approaches. As for previous BIGSS-CSS summer schools, teams of young scientists and experienced scholars are formed to work through the entire research process on a specific topic. Find the exciting line-up of projects and experts here. The results of former summer schools were published as edited volumes and in scientific journals.

The summer school takes place in Bremen (Germany), at the campus of the Constructor University from July 3 to 12, 2023. The participation fee varies between 200-700 EUR including accommodation and half board.

The Summer School is made possible by a generous grant from the Volkswagen Foundation and organized by Jan Lorenz, Bruce Edmonds, and Marijn Keijzer.

For more information, please see the summer school website.

Democratic Debate

We expect democracy to enable us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance our common welfare. In return, we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are produced by voting and/or dialogue. Voting procedures are those that somehow aggregate individual preferences and judgments. Individual preferences and judgments change as their underlying attitudes, values, and opinions change through discourse, discussion, and deliberation. In societies, these dynamics go beyond the scope of the individual – giving rise to emergent macroscopic phenomena, like consensus formation, bipolarization, issue alignment, and collective radicalization. Some of these dynamics may undermine democratic pluralism and may destabilize democratic institutions. 

Computational Methods

The projects involve data-driven modeling of opinion dynamics and democratic decisions using methods of data exploration, simulation, or prediction. They contribute to a deeper understanding of democratic debate and democratic decisions or look into the causes and consequences of political (dis)agreement. All projects have some relation to data and methods of computational social science such as social-network analysis, natural language processing, agent-based modeling and simulation, analysis of digital trace data or machine learning.

Application

Please apply online via OpenReview until April 27, 2023.