As we conclude the first year of TWIN4DEM, the project teams have made significant progress in laying the conceptual and technical foundations for the Digital Twin. This innovative model will allow us to simulate threats to democratic resilience and explore effective policy responses. In this first project update, we highlight the key developments in our conceptual and modelling work.
Understanding How Executive Power Expands
A central strand of work during the past months has focused on clarifying how executive power expands within democratic systems and how this process can be meaningfully modelled. This effort provides the analytical backbone of the Digital Twin, ensuring that political dynamics are captured in a way that reflects real-world complexity.
Key achievements include the development of a shared definition of executive aggrandisement, understood as situations in which governments expand their authority into areas traditionally reserved for other actors, thereby disrupting established checks and balances.
In parallel, the main political and institutional actors have been systematically mapped across the four case studies. These include governments, parliaments, courts, and other relevant players whose interactions form the core of the initial Digital Twin model.
Significant progress has also been made in identifying what drives actor behaviour. Structural conditions such as electoral systems, crisis situations, and institutional constraints have been organised alongside individual-level factors including career incentives, ideological orientations, and attitudes towards risk. Together, these elements help explain why actors respond differently to similar political pressures.
Country-specific expertise has been integrated through focus group discussions in each case study. These exchanges with local experts have tested whether the emerging model reflects political realities on the ground and have highlighted where adjustments are needed to capture national specificities. This step is essential to ensure that the transition from political theory to computational modelling remains empirically grounded.
Building the Digital Twin
Alongside the conceptual work, substantial advances have been made on the technical side of the Digital Twin. The overall architecture and module structure have been designed, translating analytical insights into a functioning computational framework.
Key developments include the completion of the conceptual design of the Digital Twin modules, the technical specification of the model structure and deployment options, and the implementation of an initial integrated version of the model. Early work has also focused on enabling dynamic interactions between political actors and influencing groups, allowing the model to simulate evolving political environments.
Preparations are underway to link the current model to real-world data, including the development of a data contract prototype that defines data sources, formats, and exchange protocols. This step is crucial for future validation and scenario simulations. Together, these elements represent the core building blocks required for the next phases of the project.
What comes next:
The next stage of work will deepen the country-sensitive nature of the model. Political systems in each case study will be described in greater detail, with particular attention to how executive, legislative, and judicial actors interact in practice. This includes identifying when formal distinctions between legislative and executive actions are politically meaningful and when they are blurred.
Building on this foundation, typical patterns of behaviour will be classified and connected to available empirical data on institutions, elections, crises, and other contextual factors. These inputs will be translated into a simple utility framework for each actor type, formalising how incentives and constraints shape expected choices. This step will enable a shift from a general conceptual model to consistent, country-specific representations of decision-making within the Digital Twin.
Towards a Stable and Scalable Model
Further technical milestones are planned in the coming period. These include the preliminary application of the Digital Twin using real-world data from one of the studied countries, the release of a model version based on a stable and robust technological stack, and the design of a sustainable software architecture that supports modularity, interoperability, and future development.
Rigorous internal validation will accompany these steps to ensure that the model performs as intended and meets defined technical and analytical specifications before broader use. Together, these advances will prepare the Digital Twin for more advanced simulations and policy-relevant analyses in the later stages of the project.