The European NORFACE Network has selected the grant proposal „Willingness and Capacity for EU Policy Action in Turbulent Times: Conflicts, Positions and Outcomes“, (co-)proposed by Prof. Dr. Goran Glavaš, Juniorprofessor for Text Analytics (Data and Web Science Group, School of Business Informatics and Mathematics), to be funded as one of only 14 projects within its competitive Governance (Democratic Governance in a Turbulent Age) research programme.
The project, to be carried out in collaboration with political scientists Prof. Dr. Nikoleta Yordanova (University of Leiden, Netherlands) and Dr. Zachary Green (University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom), seeks to explain and facilitate responsive and effective policy reforms by increasing knowledge about the willingness and capacity for EU integration in specific policy areas. Methodologically, the project will focus on applying state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) methods on various sources of political text (manifestos of political parties, transcripts of speeches from the European and national parliaments, and legislative EU drafts) in order to determine the drivers (EU bodies like European Parliament, European Council, and European Commission; national parties and European party groups; public) and explain the mechanics of legislative changes at the European level, for each of the policy areas (e.g., environment, public health, or consumer protection). The project is planned for three years (with the planned start in the fall this year) and with the overall budget of 1.2 million EUR.
NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Cooperation in Europe) is a partnership of national research funding agencies in Europe (for Germany, this is the German Research Foundation, DFG) dedicated to leading and developing opportunities for scientists in the area of social and behavioural sciences. Within the NORFACE Governance Research Programme, the projects were selected for funding in two very competitive stages: in the first stage stage, 46 pre-proposals (out of over 200 submissions) have been selected for extension to full proposals. In the main selection round, only 14 out of those 46 projects have been approved for funding.