Populism and Civic Engagement

Populism and Civic Engagement (PaCE) was an EU Horizon 2020 research project involving nine institutions across Europe. The project ran from February 2019 to January 2022 and studied the growth, causes and consequences of populist political movements, with a focus on how democratic institutions could respond.

Across Europe, PaCE looked at movements that claimed to challenge liberal elites and speak for the ordinary person. The project studied the contexts in which those movements grew, how they changed over time, how they related to other civic and political movements, and what risks different democratic responses might create.

Citizens Foundation's role connected that research to civic participation and open-source technology. The project engaged citizens and policy actors, including groups under-represented in public affairs, and explored digital participation methods that could help people understand and respond to complex political change.

The technical work also produced an early social-listening and narrative-analysis pipeline. Using Common Crawl data, the PaCE keyword scanner scanned thousands of keywords and search criteria, then filtered large volumes of web text with early transformer language models including BERT and RoBERTa. Already in 2019, it was using language models to help researchers identify political narratives at scale.

The public dashboard is no longer online, but the core scanner remains available as open-source code: CitizensFoundation/pace-keyword-scanner.

For more background on the research programme, see popandce.eu.