Join the next CIVICA Research Hackathon that examines the quantitative tools required for 'democracy with adjectives'.

The first two decades of the 21st century saw a proliferation of democracy indices and vivid professional debates about the conceptualisation, operationalisation, validity, reliability and global applicability of these measures. The current wave of “democracy with adjectives” poses a particularly severe challenge to quantitative tools of measurement. Is it possible to describe illiberal, populist, semi-authoritarian regimes and to capture incremental changes and nuances in consolidated liberal democracies with the same indicators and terminology? Should we develop new indicators for specific regions, specific regime-types and specific historical eras, or should we capitalise on the comparability of the existing longitudinal datasets, perhaps coming up with specific variants? Shall we re-label past categories or shall we rather construct new composite indices, relying on the same empirical data?

These are the questions in the focus of the next CIVICA Research Hackathon, organised by CIVICA institutional partners and hosted by the Central European University (CEU) as part of the CIVICA Research hackathon series, under the CIVICA theme Democracy in the 21st Century.

The event will bring together researchers, students and interested individuals, based at CIVICA partner institutions and beyond, to engage with these pertinent questions. The first part will feature a keynote speech and a panel discussion with relevant experts in the field of democracy measurement, before the opportunity is given to participants to present their proposals concerning how the existing indicators should be improved, combined or replaced.

Please find the full programme of the event here. 

More about this event

This event is organised in the framework of CIVICA Research, a project of CIVICA - The European University of Social Sciences. CIVICA Research brings together researchers from eight leading European universities in the social sciences to contribute knowledge and solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. CIVICA Research is funded by the EU's research and innovation programme Horizon 2020.

This event is part of the LSE Festival: How Do We Get to a Post-COVID World? running from Monday 13 to Saturday 18 June 2022, with a series of events exploring the practical steps we could be taking to shape a better world.

The LSE Data Science Institute (DSI) is an interdisciplinary institute established to foster the study of data science and new forms of data with a focus on their social, economic and political aspects.