Computational Social Science approaches in research on democracy

Call updates

Jun 14, 2024 3:58:06 PM

FLASH EVALUATION results

HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01

Published: 07/12/2022

Opened: 04/10/2023

Deadline: 07/02/2024

The total budget for the call was EUR 95.000.000.

The results of the evaluations per topic are as follows:

HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-06

Budget for the topic: EUR 9.000.000

Number of proposals submitted (including proposals transferred from or to other calls): 25

Number of inadmissible proposals: 0

Number of ineligible proposals: 0

Number of above-threshold proposals: 14

Total budget requested for above-threshold proposals: EUR 43054612,25

Number of proposals retained for funding: 3

Number of proposals in the reserve list: 2

Funding threshold: 13,5

(Proposals with the same score were ranked according to the priority order procedure set out in the call conditions (see in the General Annexes to the Work Programme or specific arrangements in the specific call/topic conditions).

Ranking distribution:

Number of proposals with scores lower or equal to 15 and higher or equal to 14: 1

Number of proposals with scores lower than 14 and higher or equal to 13: 4

Number of proposals with scores lower than 13 and higher or equal to 10: 10

Summary of observer report:

The observe the evaluation process of the single stage calls:

• HORIZON-CL2-2024-HERITAGE-01

• HORIZON-CL2-2024-TRANSFORMATIONS-01

• HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01.

The same independent observer reviewed the evaluation of the three calls. This enabled the observer to follow the entire process, to identify strengths and areas for possible improvements specific to the single stage evaluation, and to compare procedures and practices of a fully online evaluation with online consensus independent observer was appointed by the European Research Executive Agency (REA) to

meetings and online discussions.

REA staff ensured that for the topics associated to these 3 calls, all actors involved were fully informed about the background guidance and legal documents, procedures and standards of quality. The organization and management were very challenging because of the large number of topics and proposals. Interdisciplinarity embedded in the call texts added layers to the overall complexity.

The overall evaluation process was executed in full compliance with the procedures, code of conduct, and guiding principles of fairness, transparency and equal treatment of proposals. The rules and guiding principles for the procedures concerning each evaluation step were known in advance to the applicants, the evaluators and all the persons involved in the evaluations. The briefing materials made available to the external experts were of the highest quality as they provided all the relevant information in a clear and comprehensive way. Experts were asked to declare any potential conflict of interest and to ensure confidentiality of all information. The evaluation process was robust. No preferential treatment of any proposal was observed by the observer or reported by any expert. The discussions were fair and consistent with open and detailed online deliberations covering all the criteria and sub criteria to ensure clarity of issues (both in remote discussion meetings and/or in written communications within the evaluation system) arising and providing impartial feedback to applicants. REA continues putting significant effort into assigning proposals to evaluation groups that cover all the key disciplines relevant to the topic and provides structured training to moderators on how to help experts bridge barriers between disciplines through informed discussions that leave sufficient space for each discipline.

We recently informed the applicants about the evaluation results for their proposals.

For questions, please contact the Research Enquiry Service.

Feb 8, 2024 6:50:25 PM

PROPOSAL NUMBERS

The call HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01 has closed on 07.02.2024.

287 proposals have been submitted.

The breakdown per topic is:
HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-06: 25 proposals

Evaluation results are expected to be communicated in June 2024.

Oct 4, 2023 12:00:06 AM

The submission session is now available for: HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-06(HORIZON-RIA)

Computational Social Science approaches in research on democracy

TOPIC ID: HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01-06

Programme: Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON)
Call: Past, present and future of democracies (HORIZON-CL2-2024-DEMOCRACY-01)
Type of action: HORIZON-RIA HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions
Type of MGA: HORIZON Action Grant Budget-Based [HORIZON-AG]
Deadline model: single-stage
Planned opening date: 04 October 2023
Deadline date: 07 February 2024 17:00:00 Brussels time

ExpectedOutcome:
Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

Insights into various aspects of democracy, its institutions, its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances, interaction with structural socio-economic patterns utilising Computational Social Science[1] (CSS) to identify systematic patterns to test working hypotheses.
Develop and test methodologies that combine and integrate CSS and other Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) methods to study democratic governance, overcoming traditional academic boundaries in the field and producing synthetic data and simulation environments to stage full scale experiments which otherwise are reserved to historical study.
Use of critical approaches to data and datafication of social data, the development of alternative approaches to research including critical software studies, digital studies, and critical media studies, and development of clear and concise policy recommendations for harmonising CSS approaches with GDPR guidelines in order to encourage and facilitate such studies.
Scope:
Social sciences have not yet fully embraced the breakthrough of computational science that took place in past years with costs for data transport and data storage ceasing to be a limiting factor for data-driven social science. Developing new crosscutting tools of social and computational science will indeed contribute to better understanding how the EU society acts.

At the same time, although big data (including personal data) has become widespread and minable, datasets available to researchers for scientific enquiry are not so easily available, only under restricted regimes, or they vary in quality. Another important limitation to using these datasets is the respect of data protection regulations put in place by the European Union legislation (for instance GDPR). With CSS it could be critically examined where there is need for more data access to what kind of data, and also where there is not enough high-quality data at all. Proposals are therefore expected to propose new strategies and approaches on how to deal with data, and the lack thereof, in a way that fully complies with the EU’s notion of privacy and personal data.

A promising avenue in this respect is the creation and use for research of synthetic data sets, including full-scale synthetic reference populations. Those can link, while not interfering with personal data use restrictions, highly granular data set. As a result, empirical analysis can much better cater for distributional impacts across a wide range of types of households, and individual socio-economic backgrounds, and the impact of socio-economic policies in different geographical settings can be studied at the same level of detail as currently the case in environmental studies.

Thematically, proposals may choose whichever research focus, in the area of democracy, deemed relevant to exploit the potential of CCS. They may concentrate on testing age-old questions of political economy and political sociology and see how they change or survive when tested in a highly granular simulation environment, as synthetic population data allows to do, or they may identify more recent topics such as political communication, political participation, or resilience of democracies, in relation to structural socio-economic patterns. They may also do methodological research with access to new data sources, develop new methods, or refine existing ones, like social network analysis.

Concrete efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of the funded projects is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable), particularly in the context of real-time data feeds, exploring workflows that can provide “FAIR-by-design” data, i.e., data that is FAIR from its generation. Proposals should leverage the data and services available through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud, as well as data from relevant Data Spaces in the data-driven analyses. Additionally, efforts should be made to increase the data availability in European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud by depositing generated data in relevant infrastructures.

Clustering and cooperation with other selected projects under this topic and other relevant projects are strongly encouraged.

Proposals are encouraged to collaborate with the JRC and its Centre for Advance Studies and project on Computational Social Science for Policy.

[1] Computational Social Science (CSS) uses methods developed in statistical physics to take advantage of the very rich big data sets and identify systematic patterns to deliver new forms of testing hypothesis at comparably low costs.