Research

The Sciences Po team:

• Jan Rovny, CEE (Principal Investigator)
• Caterina Froio, CEE
• Jean-Philippe Cointet, médialab
• Romain Lachat, CEVIPOF
• Elena Cossu, CEE

Partners:

Eight institutions from across Europe form the consortium led by the CEU Democracy Institute (Hungary): University of Oxford (UK), Sciences Po (France), Charles University (Czech Republic), Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), SWPS University (Poland), The Transatlantic Foundation (Belgium) and the University of Vienna (Austria).

Period: 2022-2025

The study aims to capture the dynamics of neo-authoritarian and illiberal ideologies in the European Union as a whole, focusing in particular on seven countries: Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland and the UK.

The Sciences Po team will be responsible for the mapping of democratic and neo-authoritarian, illiberal ideologies in present-day Europe. This will be based on the most extensive data-collection work in the project: party documents, speeches of public figures and social media activity of elites and engaged citizens. The team will combine expert surveys with quantitative text analyses.

Other work packages in the project will allow, for instance:

• identifying the historico-cultural context of these ideologies,
• identifying the factors leading to the support or rejection of these ideologies,
• better understanding the transnational exchanges between illiberal movements and the policies implemented when they come to power.

The overall aim of the project is to provide policy makers with a toolbox to counter the various neo-authoritarian ideologies and improve support for liberal democracy.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team:

• Guillaume Lachenal
• Daniel Benzamouzig

Period: 2022-2026

The Tractrust project brings together researchers in anthropology, political sociology of health, communication sciences and computational social sciences. It studies the acceptance, adoption and adherence to public health measures for the prevention and control of COVID-19, using methods combining digital data and interviews. Within the médialab and in collaboration with the Health Chair (Daniel Benamouzig), as part of the Tractrust project, we are studying socio-technical controversies over COVID-19 from the digital public space, in order to examine the role of social networks in the reconfiguration of scientific expertise and evaluation.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team:

• Séverine Dusollier, École de droit (PI)
• Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi, École de droit (PI)
• Jean-Philippe Cointet, médialab (PI)
• Beatriz Botero Arcila, École de droit
• Raphaële Xenidis, École de droit
• Carola Kloeck, CERI
• Bernard Reber, CEVIPOF

Partners:

• The members of the Sorbonne University Alliance: Sorbonne University, l’université de technologie de Compiègne (UTC), le Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (MNHN), le Pôle supérieur d’enseignement artistique Paris Boulogne-Billancourt, France Education International, INSEAD, l’ENSCi-Les Ateliers, CNRS, INRIA, INSERM, IRD
• AP-HP
• Paris-Panthéon-Assas University
• Cnam
• Court of Cassation
• Economic, Social and Environmental Council
• Ircam
• IEA
• Onera
• La Fondation sciences mathématiques de Paris

PostGenAI@Paris has been developed to meet the challenges posed by the most recent advances in AI, in a world where the boundaries between technology and human intelligence are becoming progressively indistinct. This new era of “post-generative AI” (AI that goes beyond content generation to understand and interact more autonomously and contextually better adapted to its environment) brings with it scientific and technological advances, but in turn raises profound concerns and questions linked to trust, regulation and the ethics of AI. The cluster covers three main areas: disruptive technologies, healthcare and resilient societies.

The implementation of PostGenAI@Paris' scientific program is based on two main pillars. The first of these takes the form of several Collaborative Acceleration Programs (CAPs), which closely link research, training and innovation. The keystones of the cluster, these PACs are directly involved in the development of training through research, while promoting industrial collaborations on cutting-edge topics. The second pillar of the PostGenAI@Paris cluster revolves around a cross-functional program, designed to encourage interconnection between consortium members and guarantee the cluster's agility and evolution. By 2030, PostGenAI@Paris aims to establish itself as an international center of excellence, boasting cross-disciplinary expertise in the field of AI and a robust network of socio-economic collaborations. Through all these actions, the cluster contributes to the training of the next generations by significantly increasing the number of students trained each year in AI at all levels.

Sciences Po is involved in two collaborative acceleration programs: the first, “AI Normative and Distributive Effects”, and the second, “AI for augmented deliberation”.

The Sciences Po team:

• Jean-Philippe Cointet, médialab
• Martial Foucault, CEVIPOF

Partners:

• Make.org
• Sorbonne Université
• CNRS

Make.org, Sciences Po and Sorbonne-CNRS have joined forces to set up the “Democratic Communs” research program, which aims to use the potential of generative AI to preserve and strengthen democracy.

Its primary objective is to develop and share a social science scientific framework for determining democratic principles applied to AI, a model for evaluating the biases of large language models (LLMs) against these principles, debiased LLMs, and citizen participation platforms that adhere to these principles. 

The Sciences Po team: Nicolas Sauger

Partners: George N. Georgarakis (University of Vienna)

Period: 2023-2026

The rise of misinformation challenges a common conceptualization of truth or accuracy shared by citizens in modern politics, especially so in the age of internet and artificial intelligence. This disruption of a shared understanding of reality undermines the quality of decision-making, cooperation, and communication in the social, political, and economic life and increases affective polarization and political radicalization (Lazer et al. 2018). To mitigate the deleterious effects of misinformation, social scientists and policy stakeholders have proposed a plethora of interventions on online media environments. However, the comparative effectiveness of these interventions has not been tested in a systematic manner until now. 

The proposed project will examine the following question: How effective are the major behavioral interventions that aim to reduce the impact of misinformation on public opinion? To answer this question, the proposed study will examine the causal effect of exposure to misinformation and strategies to mitigate it on truth discernment, public trust, and political attitudes across different countries. 

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Frederico Varese

Period: 2021-2026

We all know that organised crime is harmful; however, some important aspects remain unknown. How do groups engaged in criminal activities (production, trade or governance) differ from each other? Do they each have a different organisational structure, members with different ‘professional’ profiles and skills? To what extent is there overlap between them? Under which conditions would one group specialising in production or trade evolve into a governance type organised crime group? The EU-funded CRIMGOV project will answer these questions. The focus will be on local cybercrime production hubs in Europe, the international trade of drugs from Colombia to Europe, and the emergence of criminal governance inside and outside prisons.

En savoir plus.

The Sciences Po team: Hélène Thiollet

How do the media and politicians frame migration flows in public discourses ? To what extent these discourses relate to actual migration and asylum flows ?

Both media and politicians react differently to various international movements of people according to incomers origin, nationality and socio-political and economic contexts in which discourses are anchored. They also both construct discourses about migration and notably about “migration crises”, absent any substantial inflows of migrants, but in connection with broader national or international political issues. The DIMIG project intends to better understand the interactions between migration flows, the media and political discourses. This relationship is part of a more general puzzle in social sciences : How do discourses shape (mis)representations of social realities ?

The project brings together economists, political scientists, geographers and data scientists and relies upon mixed methods.

The project is split in two work packages and teams :

• A team based at CERI-Sciences Po led by Hélène Thiollet, together with its partner institutions works on migration crisis discourses, polarisation and geographical imaginations in the media across multiple contexts (France, Iran, Italy, Poland, Turkey, the UK and the US) : learn more
• A team based at the Department of Economics at Université Paris 1 led by Léa Marchal and Claire Naiditch, works on political discourses on immigration in France : learn more

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: 

• Kevin Arceneaux
• Martial Foucault

Democracy is in retreat around the world. Over the past decade, the decline in democracy has been notable not only in countries that have just recently transitioned to democracy but also in advanced, stable democratic systems in Europe and North America (Diamond 2021). Political polarization and the spread of misinformation are often cited as culprits in the rise of contested democracy (Finkel et al. 2020; Kingzette et al. 2021; Osmundsen 2021; Vosoughi et al. 2018). In turn, the Online Public Sphere and more specifically the online media sphere have been implicated in both the growth of polarization and the spread of misinformation. The goal of our project is to understand the breadth and contours of the Online Public Sphere (both positive and negative) as well as investigate how it could be structured in ways that encourage more healthy behaviors and support good digital governance.

In this project we propose developing and administering an innovative research design for both understanding how people engage with the online public sphere as well as test interventions that are designed to cultivate healthier and more constructive online behaviors. We plan to do so in the context of the French presidential and legislative elections slated for spring 2022. Following the experience of the last national elections in France, we anticipate that the electoral campaign will be emotionally charged, polarizing, and filled with attempts to spread misinformation. Our research approach will cast a broad net by studying a wide range of attitudes and behavior, both on- and offline.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Jen Schradie

Period: 2023-2027

What shapes how people respond to disinformation? Fake news, online deception, and computational propaganda are all terms to describe a phenomenon that has generated a broad array of studies, particularly over the past five years, yet one puzzle remains. Dramatically more people believe disinformation than those who report consuming it (Allen et al. 2020; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Tsfati et al. 2020). Understanding the mechanisms of this disconnect is the primary objective of my ACTIVEINFO research project. Most of this extant research has focused on top-down factors of disinformation diffusion in the digital era (3D), including Big Tech platform companies, the role of government regulation, and powerful political and financial actors. All of these approaches suggest that the audience for disinformation is passive, rather than active participants in the generation and recirculation of news and information, going against decades of communication research (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). The project will advance the 3D state of the art by avoiding the bias of selecting on the dependent variable of digitally visible disinformation and, instead, examine a broader array of bottom-up and everyday media practices. Furthermore, the project will uncover not just what people are sharing, but what they are not sharing and why. In ACTIVEINFO the project will address this selection bias in the literature with a two-country comparison (France and the United States) via qualitative-rich fieldwork and mixed methods, often absent from online data collection procedures.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Jen Schradie

What shapes whether people receive, believe, and share disinformation? The rise of ‘fake news’ has become an area of deep concern worldwide, raising questions about the role of information in democratic societies. Observers often point to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, based on falsehoods about election results, as a critical turning point in how disinformation has dire consequences. Despite a dramatic increase in disinformation research, a crucial and remaining puzzle is that a large number of people believe fake news claims while only a small number of people (often below 1%) consume fake news in their daily news diet (Allen et al. 2020; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Tsfati et al. 2020). How and why do people report that they trust unverified information if they are not actually consuming this news directly? To understand this empirical disconnect in the diffusion of disinformation in the digital era (3Ds), this mixed-methods research, DeCodingDisInfo advances the state of the art that selects on the dependent variable of digitally visible fake news and top-down levers of distribution. Current scholarship skews toward top-down powerful players: platforms (like Twitter), politicians (like Trump), or policies (like the GDPR). The audience for disinformation, however, is usually viewed as passive individuals without institutional affiliation. This extant research ignores the broader array of everyday bottom-up active media practices and mechanisms of sharing—or not sharing. Instead, DeCodingDisInfo, an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods project, will uncover how information – both fake news and otherwise – circulates in the digital media environment and in offline spaces. Taking a deeply contextualized and community-based approach, our team will harness the power of a two-country comparison and examine how ideology and institutions shape information flows. This will result in publicly available tools to better decode and deconstruct fake news.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Philipp Brandt

Partner: Soror SAHRI, Université Paris Cité

Our objective is to complement the ML applications with insights from social science to understand discriminatory hiring decisions and ensure fair treatment for all. Specifically, we intend to introduce a framework for identifying and mitigating gender fairness issues arising in the composition of the underlying datasets (e.g. demographics dataset) used by ML applications. We apply an interpretable approach to demographics data to identify and observe the potential data features caused by drifts for demographic predictions that are unknown from social scientists before, and can raise concerns in gender fairness. This approach allows us to analyze the interpretability of prediction models, particularly black-box models that are known to be uninterpretable.

The Sciences Po team: 

• Sylvain Brunier
• Jean-Noël Jouzel

Period: 2023-2028

The Coevolution of Equipment, Digital Technologies and Agroecological models project, funded by the ANR's priority research program and equipment, is managed by Pierre Labarthe, Director of Research at INRAE. It brings together 16 research units and around 50 permanent researchers and academics in the social sciences, including Sylvain Brunier and Jean-Noël Jouzel for the CSO, alongside AGIR, DATASPHERE, INNOVATIONS, ITAP, LEREPS, TERRITOIRES and TETIS.

The CoEDiTAg project (Coevolution of Equipment, Digital Technologies and Agroecological models) aims to understand the co-evolution between 1) the trajectories of development of equipment and digital technologie, and 2) the transformations of the structures, arrangements and organisations that frame agroecological transitions. This project posits that the direction of this coevolution is not predetermined and depends, to a large extent, on the strategies of actors, their socio-economic interactions and public policies. Indeed, Equipment and Digital Technologies (EDiTs) can reinforce the industrialisation of agriculture or be a lever for a stronger ecologisation of agriculture. CoEDiTAg gathers research in different social sciences to understand the mechanisms of this co-evolution.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Kevin Mellet

Partners: 

• Christine Balagué, IMT-BS et Titulaire de la Chaire Good in Tech
• Inna Lyubareva, IMT Atlantique
• Cecile Bothorel, IMT Atlantique

Period: 2023-2026

Even if virtual reality and augmented reality have been sources of research publications, the metaverse remains an emerging area of research. The objective of this project is to study the dynamics of metaverse communities’ users’ behaviors, i.e. real behaviors, to better understand the benefits and risks of such immersive technological universes and the determinants of their adoption. The expected results of the netnography (qualitative part of the project) will be a better understanding of the interactions on the metaverse and the governance of the communities. The quantitative part of the project (NLP, dynamic graphs, algorithmic community detection) will provide the insights on the communities’ structures, their dynamic evolution, and the role of intra and extra factors. Finally, on this basis we expect to provide the recommendations for the industrial actors, policy makers and users of metaverses communities. The coordination team includes complementary skills in sociology (Sciences Po), computer science, computational social sciences and management (IMT). Additionally, the research team has a strong expertise in analysis of online platforms, communities, and social networks.

The project will include the recommendations for the industrial actors, policy makers and users of metaverses communities as well as a specific report on the benefits and risks of metaverse communities based on real users’ experiences. These publications will be available on the GoodInTech website. In terms of impact and valorization of the results, 3 GoodInTech webinars, corresponding to the three parts of the project, will be organized during the course of the study. The project will end up with a final conference on the metaverse challenges.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Eduardo Perez

Period: 2021-2026

Informational environments are largely endogenous. They can be, and often are, chosen or designed by individuals or organizations with specific objectives in mind. As recognized by a large literature in economics, information plays a crucial role in shaping the outcome of downstream decisions by strategic players (i.e. at the receiving end of informative signals). However, the structure of information also impacts decisions by strategic agents upstream of the generation of signals, as agents mould the underlying reality differently depending on how other players will eventually be informed about it. Finally, designed information production systems are susceptible to manipulations by third party agents pursuing their own interests.

I will seek to further our understanding of socially or privately optimal information designs, how they shape upstream and downstream decisions, how they can be manipulated by private interests, and how to best anticipate and counter such manipulations. I will rely on the analysis of a largely unexplored designer-agent-receiver class of games, in which the designer picks an information generation system, the agent takes an upstream decision affecting the states of the world, or manipulates the production of information, and receivers choose downstream actions based on realized signals.

The project is organized around the different technologies available to the agent. I will consider fake news production, which is the fabrication of signals that pass as informative but are in fact independent of the truth; state falsification, which consists in falsifying the state of the world, or feeding the information production process with falsified data; pure agency, which is the possibility for the agent to secretly deviate to a different but undistinguishable information generation technology; and state shifting, which is the upstream effort an agent can exert to actually transform the probability distribution of states of the world.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Julia Cagé

Period: 2021-2026

The goal of PARTICIPATE is to develop a comprehensive approach to the study of campaign finance, information and influence, using new individual-level data and investigating recent changes in participation behaviors. What are the motives behind small campaign contributions? Does tax policy affect political giving? Why are so few politicians from the working class and can this change? What is the ability of the media to induce citizens to make electoral decisions they would not make if reporting were unbiased? While there is evidence at the macro level on the flow of money in elections, news consumption, or the extent of charitable giving, relatively little is known at the micro level, e.g. on individual-level behaviours such as the motivations of small donors, the tax-price elasticity of political donations, or the exposure to competing information flows. PARTICIPATE will help fill this gap. By providing groundbreaking evidence on new forms of participation, it will lead to the reassessment of influential theories of special interest groups and policy formation. One distinguishing feature of the proposal is to combine comprehensive individual-level datasets and the use of computer sciences tools (such as natural language processing techniques and machine learning).

PARTICIPATE will advance the existing research in three steps. First, I will propose a unified analysis of political contributions. This will include a groundbreaking assessment of the importance of small campaign donations, and a combined study of charitable giving and political contributions investigating the impact of tax policy on donations. Fundraising success can lead to the emergence of new candidates. I will then consider citizens’ decision to run for elections, and investigate the role played by network in political selection. Finally, given the importance of media organizations in shaping participation, I will study the changing patterns of information propagation and political influence.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Julia Cagé

Period: 2021-2026

Over the past few years, the issue of disinformation has become particularly salient around the world due to the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidency (see among other Allcott and Gentzkow 2017). Citizens are not equal in front of misinformation. Less-educated people as well as younger ones seem to be more vulnerable to fake news. More generally, “information inequality” is an important concern: people in certain socio-economic segments are much more likely to be informed about recent political events – and to be able to confidently distinguish real news from fake news – than individual in other ones (see in particular Angelucci and Prat 2021). Free access to high-quality news is often discussed as one tool that could be of use to reduce information inequality. In this spirit, a number of countries such as France and Canada have recently introduced policies such as tax credit for a subscription to a newspaper. In 2019, as part of the Protecting Journalism in the Age of Digital Platforms report, Cagé, Prat and others argued in favor of “media vouchers”: give each adult a voucher to donate to her favored media outlets.

But to which extent giving free access to high-quality news (and ensuring high-quality news production) guarantees that citizens who do not consume news will do so when provided with free information, in particular in a digital world where news compete online with entertainment (Gavazza, Nardotto, and Valletti 2019) ? Past research has shown that people may decide to select themselves out of news (see e.g. Prior 2007), and the issue of whether people are used to consuming news is thus a central one. This seems of particular importance for young generations confronted from their early age with an infinite amount of choices. People indeed tend to develop a taste for high-quality news reporting when they are young, so with habit formation they might continue to consume high-quality journalism after they graduate.

While a small number of recent papers in the literature have measured the effects of exposing citizens to politically biased news outlets (Levy 2021; Broockman and Kalla 2021), this research project will be the very first to investigate whether exposing young people to high-quality digital news impacts their political knowledge and overall ability to fight misinformation.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team:

• Julia Cagé
• Sergei Guriev
• Emeric Henry

In this project, PI propose to develop and test new solutions and methods to slow down or block the spread of false news and alternative facts. We propose solutions at two levels: upstream, to improve the regulation of platform companies and improve fact-checking procedures, and downstream, to enhance users’ ability to recognize false news. Our project will therefore both enhance digital governance, by proposing and evaluating changes to the design of social media, enhance the impact of fact checking, by evaluating best practices, and improve digital literacy, by designing and testing a training app that will be used in practice.

Our unique collaboration with the AFP Factuel allows us to study the universe of French language fake news topics, ranging from recent covid misinformation in Congo, antisemitic conspiracy theories in Canada or fake news during the upcoming French presidential election 2022. Our approach is thus suitable to establish best practices for fact-checking and social media platforms around the globe.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Alfred Galichon

Period: 2020-2026

This project seeks to build an innovative economic toolbox (ranging from modelling, computation, inference, and empirical applications) for the study of equilibrium models with gross substitutes, with applications to models of matching with or without transfers, trade flows on networks, multinomial choice models, as well as hedonic and dynamic pricing models. While under-emphasized in general equilibrium theory, equilibrium models with gross substitutes are very relevant to these problems as each of these problems can be recast as such.

Thus far, almost any tractable empirical model of these problems typically required making the strong assumption of quasilinear utilities, leading to a predominance of models with transferable utility in applied work. The current project seeks to develop a new paradigm to move beyond the transferable utility framework to the imperfectly transferable utility one, where the agent’s utilities are no longer quasi-linear.

The mathematical structure of gross substitutes will replace the structure of convexity underlying in models with transferable utility.

To investigate this class of models, one builds a general framework embedding all the models described above, the “equilibrium flow problem.” The gross substitute property is properly generalized and properties (existence of an equilibrium, uniqueness, lattice structure) are derived. Computational algorithms that rely on gross substitutability are designed and implemented. The econometrics of the problem is addressed (estimation, inference, model selection). Applications to various fields such as labor economics, family economics, international trade, urban economics, industrial organization, etc. are investigated.

The project touches upon other disciplines. It will propose new ideas in applied mathematics, offer new algorithms of interest in computer science and machine learning, and provide new methods in other social sciences (like sociology, demography and geography).

Learn more about the project.

L'équipe de Sciences Po : Clément de Chaisemartin

Applied economists routinely evaluate the effect of economic policies. For instance, what is the effect of raising the minimum wage on employment? Angrist & Pischke (2010) argue that applied economics has recently experienced a ""credibility revolution'': by switching to transparent methods to evaluate policies, applied economists have increased the credibility of their findings, and the impact of their work. In the first part of this proposal, de Chaisemartin shows that the credibility revolution is not complete. Two-way fixed effects regression, a policy-evaluation method used in as many as 26% of the most-highly cited papers recently published in the American Economic Review, relies on the assumption that the policy's effect is constant, across units and over time. In most applications, this assumption is not credible. Therefore, the project proposes a series of new differences-in-differences estimators, that do not rely on this constant effect assumption, and that can be used in virtually all the applications where two-way fixed effects regressions have been used. In the second part of this proposal, de Chaisemartin argues that the credibility revolution's focus on unbiased estimators may be hard to defend, as variance also matters. The project explores two ways of trading-off bias and variance. The first amounts to combining an unbiased and a biased but potentially more efficient estimator of the same parameter. The second amounts to deriving the minimax estimator of the policy's effect, under the assumption that this effect cannot be larger than a (potentially large) constant B. Finally, the third part investigates the potential impact of the ``credibility revolution''. Specifically, a randomized controlled trial will be run to measure the effect of following an online course presenting policy evaluations, in two very different populations: policy makers and members of the general public, focusing on individuals with a low trust in institutions in that second group.

En savoir plus.

L'équipe de Sciences Po : Jean-Marc Robin

Research proposal MARNET aims at improving our empirical knowledge of markets structured as bipartite networks (all connections involve two different categories of agents) by providing better statistical models of network formation and of the effects of the network structure on outcomes.

The use of random graphs, in which an edge between two nodes is the realization of a random draw, to model networked social, technological and biological systems has been subject to a novel and vigorous effort over the last twenty years. Robin will contribute to the knowledge corpus on networked economic systems with two separate research lines: first, in studying marriage formation and intrahousehold resource allocation; second, in studying wage dynamics and employment mobility using linked employer-employee data.

The first research line aims to better understand why different marriage markets (regions, countries, time periods) look different. The aim is to disentangle and quantify the sources of differentiation that relate to standard socio-economic variables, such as education and wages, from those that relate to culture and social norms. Various extensions will be considered to improve the design and realism of the model (aging and fertility, lots of heterogeneity, unobserved heterogeneity, housing and asset accumulation).

In the second research line, recent advances in dynamic random graphs will be used to model individual wage dynamics and the mobility of workers across firms. The main empirical objective is to quantify the degree of assortative matching of workers and firms in the labour market, and the relative contributions of worker and firm heterogeneity in wages. Several extensions will be considered (time-varying types, subjecting the network structure to pre-determined firm sizes, opening firm nodes by modelling wage dynamics and occupational mobility within firms).

En savoir plus.

The Sciences Po team:

• Beatriz Botero Arcila
• Séverine Dusollier
• Jeremy Perelman
• Guillaume Tusseau

How can the values and rights needed to sustain democracies and the common good be upheld and ensured in our digital world? What is the role of the law in doing so? Sciences Po’s Law School Towards a New Digital Rule of Law project will assess the legal governance/regulation of the Internet and of some of its technologies in identified case studies in order to develop a new line of research investigating and experimenting the necessary role of law in current internet evolution. The Law School intends to develop this line of research for the years to come around different specific issues challenging the rule of law. In the next three years, the Project will focus on examining the value and of constitutional law concepts for a digital rule of law, how to govern AI to make it compatible with democracies, and how to use infrastructures to govern and how to govern infrastructures to address data inequality and shape a less concentrated web. All projects will be developed emphasizing three main pillars (1) hosting and supporting rigorous academic research focused on relevant governance challenges;(2) channeling the research into early action and early impact through the law school’s clinical program; and (3) implementing public outreach, by hosting conferences and workshops where different stakeholders can discuss and influence policy on time-contingent issues.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team:

• Beatriz Botero Arcila
• Rachel Griffin

The 2022 Digital Services Act (DSA) establishes a new comprehensive regulatory framework for online platforms in the EU. It reserves the most extensive obligations for ‘very large online platforms’ (VLOPs), defined as those with over 45 million users. These platforms are considered particularly important for the broader media system and for political and democratic discourse. VLOPs are obliged to assess and evaluate ‘systemic risks’ in specified areas (e.g. fundamental rights, polarisation, public health and security); reasonably and proportionately mitigate these risks; and report to the Commission on their
mitigation measures.

Importantly, the DSA also introduces mechanisms for vetted researchers to access platforms’ internal data “for the sole purpose of conducting research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union”. Policymakers envisage that independent scrutiny from academic researchers and civil society organisations will play an essential role in identifying and defining systemic risks associated with social media, as well as holding VLOPs accountable for effectively mitigating them.

This project will bring together a team of researchers from Sciences Po’s Law School and Médialab to be a central part of that effort. The project aims to monitor and critically evaluate how the systemic risk framework is being implemented, and to position itself as a key resource for regulators implementing and enforcing the DSA. It will provide actionable guidance and resources for regulators, civil society and researchers on how to utilise this framework to strengthen the governance of online media platforms.

We will focus on two main lines of research: How are systemic risks and appropriate risk mitigation measures understood and defined by VLOPs and other stakeholders within the DSA framework? What data should researchers have access to in order to evaluate and monitor systemic risks within the DSA framework?

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Dina Waked

Partner: Stanford Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX)

Contemporary digital markets are dominated by business models based on proprietary software, centralising decision-making power in a few hands, and allocating revenues to shareholders and management. Contrastingly, the novel technologies referred to as “Web3” and artificial intelligence (“AI”) come with the promise of fostering new governance structures that enable the transition to open standards and protocols, collaborative decision-making, and giving a voice to a broader range of stakeholders. Desynchronised with the new technological frontiers, organisational laws worldwide revolve around the standard corporate form with asset ownership, centralised management, and a narrow orientation towards shareholder value. Yet this corporate form was crafted in response to the technological affordances of the previous century, when transaction and agency costs prohibited the emergence of open-source, collaborative and multi-stakeholder governance mechanisms. Given the technological affordances of Web3 and AI, there is a misfit between technological development and the governance models recognised by the law. Building on this misfit, this project questions how legal systems can adapt to and foster innovative governance mechanisms. This overarching question is split in three sub-questions: 1) how can novel technologies be leveraged to create associational models that provide a meaningful alternative to the corporate form, 2) how the transition to open-source models and decomposable tokens will affect property rights, and 3) what legal forms will Web3 and AI applications evolve to take.

These questions are topical for several reasons. First, instead of enabling a fairer distribution of economic opportunities and bolstering participatory mechanisms, technological developments have been instrumentalized for anti-democratic purposes, concentrating outsize economic power in the hands of a few. Second, we witness the shortcomings of traditional governance mechanisms in the case of companies active at the frontier of innovation, the OpenAI debacle being only an episode in a series of scandals. These trends render this research exceptionally timely. 

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Donato Ricci, Pauline Gourlet, Dominique Cardon, Valentin Goujon, Maxime Crépel, Axel Meunier 

Partners: 

• Concordia / INRS (Canada)
• ZeMKI / HIIG (Germany)
• CIM, Warwick (UK)

Shaping AI is a multi-national and multi-disciplinary social research project that examines the global trajectories of public discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) in four countries (Germany, UK, Canada and France) over a ten-year period 2012-2021. 

Our comparative analysis will enable us to understand the differences and similarities in the construction of AI as a new scientific paradigm, societal force and contested political reality in these four countries by contextualizing their geo-political, historical and situational peculiarities. Funded by the European Open Research Area initiative for a period of three years (February 2021 - February 2024), Shaping AI brings together leading research teams from each of the four countries under scrutiny.

Our project aims to be critical, comparative, qualitative, and to this end, we have adopted a four-dimensional research design, with the four teams collaborating to map and analyse AI controversies in and across four different spheres in which public discourse about AI has taken shape in the last ten years: media, policy, research and participation.

The research on AI controversies in each of the four spheres is led by a different research team, with the study of "spill-over" controversies that have arisen between the spheres reserved for the second half of the project.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: Sylvain Parasie

Partners: 

MEDIALEX est un projet de recherche collaboratif qui rassemble, autour de deux laboratoires de sciences sociales et deux laboratoires d’informatique, des chercheur·se·s qui sont habitué·e·s à travailler ensemble : 

1) Le médialab, spécialisé dans le développement des méthodes numériques pour les sciences sociales, 

2) Le LATTICE, laboratoire de l’École Normale Supérieure/PSL, apporte des compétences importantes dans le domaine du traitement automatique de la langue. 

3) Le service de la Recherche de l’INA, apporte ses compétences en TAL et permet d’accéder à des corpus de données provenant des médias audiovisuels français (chaînes TV, radio) dont l’INA assure la conservation et qu’ils enrichissent par des méthodes de TAL (speech to text, détection d’événement, etc.) 

4) Le CREST, laboratoire d’économie, de statistique et de sociologie quantitative, apportera son expertise de sociologie politique dans l’étude à la fois ethnographique et numérique du monde parlementaire français. 

À ces partenaires s’ajoute une collaboration privilégiée avec le CARISM, de l’Université Panthéon-Assas.

Period: 2021-2025

L’essor des technologies numériques a profondément déstabilisé l’espace public, en élargissant l’accès à la parole publique. Les transformations médiatiques, notamment liées à l’essor des réseaux sociaux, ont permis à un plus grand nombre d’acteurs d’alimenter en sujets le débat public. En témoigne le mouvement des “gilets jaunes”, au départ très éloigné des sphères médiatiques et politiques, qui est parvenu à imposer de nouveaux thèmes dans le débat public notamment par le biais des réseaux sociaux, ce qui s’est traduit par l’adoption d’une loi de “mesures d’urgence économique et sociale” fin 2018. En témoigne également la démarche de nombreux parlementaires et élus, qui s’expriment sur les réseaux sociaux en courtcircuitant les médias traditionnels, intermédiaires incontournables de l’accès au public jusque-là.

Dans ce contexte, le projet MEDIALEX vise à répondre à la question suivante : dans quelle mesure la numérisation de l’espace public a-t-elle bouleversé la capacité des élus, des médias traditionnels et des publics à imposer les sujets prioritaires du débat public ? Autrement dit, comment les transformations de l’espace public et médiatique modifient-elles les dynamiques d’émergence, d’imposition et de circulation des thèmes dans le débat public ?

Pour répondre à cette question, le projet MEDIALEX propose de développer des méthodes numériques originales, en combinant des compétences de sciences sociales, à la fois quantitatives et qualitatives, avec des compétences en modélisation et en traitement automatique de la langue. Il s’agit ainsi de traiter de grands corpus de données et de traces numériques, de façon à pouvoir identifier les dynamiques d’influence entre les mondes parlementaire et médiatique et la sphère publique. Du point de vue du traitement automatique du langage, il s’agit de détecter des thèmes, événements, petites phrases et citations qui peuplent les différents sous-espaces. Ces méthodes permettront de modéliser à différents grains les logiques d’influence entre ces trois arènes discursives.

Learn more about the project (FR).

The Sciences Po team: Jean-Philippe Cointet

Partners: 

• Max Planck Institute
• University of Amsterdam
• Free University of Brussels
• University of Venice Cà Foscari
• Karlsruher Institute of Technology
• University of Leipzig
• University of Bristol

Current diagnoses that democracy is in crisis at the beginning of the 21st century share a common argumentative reference point: the (implicit) reference to the dysfunctional constitution of the political public sphere which is currently undergoing structural change. The rise of social media platforms is considered as one of its main constituents. While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, these platforms also lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, an erosion of norms in public debate and a loss of trust in traditional institutions.

The project will reconsider the diagnoses of this crisis by:

(1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact of social media on society with respect to political debates,

(2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this impact and

(3) developing tools that improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e., deliberation, legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team:

• Sylvain Parasie 
• Pedro Ramaciotti Morales

Period: 2022-2024

The last two decades have seen the emergence of different hypotheses about disorders of digital public spaces, such as fragmentation (or “bubbles”), polarization, extremism, and the role that algorithms mediating this space might have on them by pushing the visibility and virality of particular contents. Conclusive results, however, have proved elusive, as a growing body of research seems to present a contradicting picture: disorders might be pervasive, capturing the attention of policy makers and the general public, but with no widely-accepted definitions or metrics emerging to quantify them or the role algorithm might have on them, let alone actionable means to design better algorithms that would minimize identified negative outcomes. Meanwhile, growing evidence suggests that Recommender Systems might be leveraging political opinions of users and other features of public debate associated with societal cleavages. This project takes inspiration in ideological social network embedding methods and political surveys for the analysis of party systems in policy spaces to propose a double network and opinion space modeling of digital public spaces. Using this double network and spatial opinion analysis, this project then proposes to test whether algorithms learn and leverage political opinions of users through algorithmic explainability, how they affect information dynamics in public debate, and to open a path towards actionable tools capable of guiding algorithm design, governance, and policy.

Learn more about the project.

The Sciences Po team: 

• Jean-Philippe Cointet
• Donato Ricci

Partners:

• CNRS
• MNHN
• IFREMER
• Réseau des universités marines : Université Littoral Côte d’Opale, Université de Nantes, Université de Bordeaux, Université de Montpellier et Aix-Marseille Université
• Office français de la biodiversité

Period: 2021- 2028

Le projet de recherche FUTURE-Obs, lauréat de l’appel à projets « Un océan de solutions » du « Programme prioritaire de recherche » (PPR), a pour objectif de proposer des stratégies d’observations multi-échelles et multidisciplinaires des socio-écosystèmes qui associent aux approches traditionnelles d’observations de l’océan, de nouvelles techniques comme la génomique environnementale et l’imagerie in situ pour la biodiversité, ou encore l’utilisation des données provenant des réseaux sociaux pour les usages. Cette combinaison de méthodes ouvre de nouvelles voies d’étude et conduit à la mise en place d’observatoires dits augmentés. La multiplicité des données acquises à différentes échelles et sur l’ensemble des composantes des socio-écosystèmes favorisera l’élaboration de nouveaux indicateurs faisant appel aux outils issus du champ de l’intelligence artificielle comme le machine learning. Il s’agira ainsi, d’une part, de suivre et de mieux appréhender le fonctionnement et les trajectoires des socio-écosystèmes côtiers, et d’autre part, de faciliter la mise en œuvre d’initiatives conçues pour répondre aux principaux enjeux environnementaux actuels.

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The Sciences Po team: Achim EDELMANN

Period: 2022-2025

Digital transformation has significantly changed how information is shared. Platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter have become key for spreading information, but they also allow for the spread of false or harmful content. This project will show the impact of scientific and political endorsements on its spread. It will help identify effective ways to reduce misinformation and its polarizing effects. Additionally, it will improve scientific outreach by providing clear strategies for science to act as a trusted information source. It will also impact education by informing future research and helping students navigate social media safely and effectively.

Learn more about the project.