Research

Three clusters organised around digital politics

DigiPols research is organised around three core clusters that bring together social scientists and computer scientists working on complementary areas. These activities are coordinated and supported through the DigiPols Forum.

cluster.01
applied

Applied Political Communication

Political communication is concerned with how information is exchanged between political actors — from politicians and governments to civil society and citizens — and the role played by intermediary actors, such as the news media, in this transmission.

The communication linkages are multi-faceted and increasingly digitalised. This cluster is focused on the applied aspects of political communication that involve experimentation, such as lab and field experiments. Most of the ongoing research is associated with the pioneering work of DigiPols researchers on Voting Advice Applications.

Lead: V. Triga

cluster.02
monitoring

Media & Social Media Monitoring

This area is centred on the development of data-collection platforms that track particular domains of interest. Work has been conducted on building real-time data collection during election campaigns, evaluating the communication of policy by the EU, and monitoring multilingual communication practices.

Lead: C. Tziouvas

cluster.03
opinion

Public Opinion & Argument Mining

This cluster develops techniques and tools for the analysis of public opinion. It includes both traditional forms of public-opinion research, such as surveys, and more recent big-data approaches to opinion mining. A complementary area is argument mining, which draws inspiration from computational linguistics.

Lead: N. Tsapatsoulis