As part of TWIN4DEM’s commitment to openness and transparency, the project’s GitHub repository is now publicly available. The repository hosts the project’s technical developments and will serve as a central location for sharing code, tools, and technical outputs as they become available throughout the project.

Researchers, policymakers, developers, and other interested stakeholders are invited to follow the repository to stay informed about future updates and developments related to the TWIN4DEM Digital Twin.

The repository currently contains the first publicly released code and technical outputs, with additional content expected to be added as research activities progress. All code is released under the EUPL v1.2 licence, supporting reuse and further development in line with open-source principles.

Follow the repository for updates and learn more about the technical work supporting TWIN4DEM’s research on democratic resilience and executive aggrandisement.

Work Package 4 focuses on creating the integrated datasets that will power the TWIN4DEM Digital Twin. Bringing together socio-economic data from surveys, elections, censuses, and other public sources, alongside textual data generated in previous project activities, WP4 establishes the data backbone needed for advanced democratic analysis.

The main objectives of WP4 are to:

• Identify the most relevant and reliable data sources for the Digital Twin
• Clean, harmonise, and standardise data from diverse sources
• Aggregate and connect datasets into coherent, interoperable structures
• Ensure compliance with legal, ethical, and data protection requirements
• Deliver integrated datasets ready to support modelling, simulation, and analysis activities in WP5

By transforming complex and fragmented information into high-quality, interconnected datasets, WP4 lays the groundwork for the development of a robust Digital Twin.

This question guided two focus group discussions held in spring 2026, bringing together researchers, civil society representatives and policy experts interested in the development of innovative tools for analysing democratic systems.

The sessions built on previous discussions and provided participants with a closer look at the latest version of a digital simulation platform designed to explore how political institutions and actors interact under different conditions.

Testing political scenarios

During the discussions, participants explored a range of simulated political scenarios, including majority and minority governments, coalition dynamics and the influence of individual political actors on decision-making processes. Through a combination of demonstrations and interactive discussions, participants examined how changes in political circumstances could affect the behaviour of institutions and broader political outcomes. The objective was not to predict the future, but to better understand how different factors may influence democratic systems and governance dynamics.

Transparency and Accessibility as Key Themes

A recurring topic throughout the discussions was the importance of making complex political analysis understandable and accessible. Participants highlighted the value of clear explanations regarding how simulations operate, how results are generated and how users can interpret the outcomes. The conversations also explored broader questions related to transparency, trust and the communication of complex information through digital platforms. The discussions demonstrated that technological innovation alone is not sufficient; users also need confidence in the information presented and a clear understanding of the underlying processes.

Looking ahead

The focus groups formed part of an ongoing effort to engage stakeholders in discussions about the opportunities and challenges of using digital technologies to explore political and institutional developments. The conversations highlighted strong interest in innovative approaches that can make complex democratic processes more visible and understandable, while fostering informed dialogue among diverse communities and experts.

What happens when democratic institutions begin to weaken, and how can we detect it early?

In this TWIN4DEM interview, the Work Package 3 leader discusses how computational text analysis and AI-driven methodologies can help identify patterns of executive aggrandisement, democratic backsliding, and societal responses across Europe.

WP3 explores large-scale political and public discourse through innovative computational approaches, contributing to the development of evidence-based tools for safeguarding democracy, transparency, and the rule of law.

The interview covers:
• The objectives and scope of WP3
• Computational approaches to democracy research
• Detecting executive aggrandisement through text analysis
• Monitoring political and societal reactions
• The role of AI and digital methods in social sciences

In this interview, the leader of Work Package 2 explains the frameworks and analytical approaches used to conceptualize the various pathways to executive aggrandizement. The discussion provides insight into the methodological foundations underpinning the TWIN4DEM project’s research on democratic resilience, examining how executive power expansion threatens democratic institutions and the analytical tools developed to study these phenomena.

In March, the TWIN4DEM project continued its participatory work through a new round of online focus groups in Hungary, Czechia, France and the Netherlands. The sessions brought together a diverse group of stakeholders, including policymakers, civil society representatives, journalists, and researchers, ensuring a wide range of perspectives.

These discussions marked an important milestone in the project’s development. Participants were invited to explore the first version of the TWIN4DEM “toy model”, an early-stage digital twin designed to simulate pathways of executive aggrandizement. This initial exposure allowed stakeholders to engage directly with the concept and provide feedback on its structure, functionality, and potential applications.

The discussions generated valuable insights into how the model can be made both meaningful and usable for its intended audiences. A recurring point raised by participants was the importance of transparency: for the model to gain trust and be widely adopted, it must clearly communicate not only its outputs and scenario variations, but also the underlying mechanisms that generate them.

In parallel, participants highlighted key ethical and governance considerations. Ensuring full compliance with data protection standards, including GDPR, was identified as a fundamental requirement. Particular attention was given to decisions around data storage and infrastructure, as well as the need to provide clear, accessible explanations of how user data is collected, processed, and managed—especially in cases where external services are integrated.

To further strengthen this co-creation process, two additional online focus group discussions are scheduled for 29 April and 11 May. These sessions will aim to gather further input, with a specific focus on increasing participation from Hungary and Czechia, in order to ensure stronger contextual representation and more locally grounded insights.

The feedback collected throughout these activities will directly inform the next phase of the project. The TWIN4DEM team will continue refining the model, expanding its data foundations, and preparing it for further testing and validation. Ongoing stakeholder engagement remains central to this process, ensuring that the digital twin evolves as a robust, transparent, and policy-relevant tool aligned with real-world democratic needs.

In this video interview, the TWIN4DEM Dissemination Manager discusses how the project approaches dissemination, communication, and exploitation to ensure that its research and results are visible, accessible, and impactful.

The conversation explores the challenge of engaging diverse stakeholder communities, particularly across the social sciences and computational sciences, and explains how TWIN4DEM uses tailored messaging, clear language, and cross-disciplinary dialogue to connect different audiences. It also highlights the importance of stakeholder feedback and focus groups in shaping communication choices and making outreach more inclusive and responsive.

This interview is part of the TWIN4DEM video series, offering insights into the project’s key roles, interdisciplinary work, and contribution to strengthening democratic resilience.

Collecting Political Texts for the Detection of Executive Aggrandisement

The first step towards the goal of identifying executive aggrandisement and analysing politicians’ stance and reactions is the collection of relevant data. In TWIN4DEM, multiple textual sources are being integrated, including legislative texts, parliamentary debates and politicians’ social media posts. Although several initiatives aim at collecting and making available the above data, both through official channels such as Data.gouv.fr and based on researchers’ and activists’ initiatives such as the ParlaClarin project, the current infrastructure does not provide this comprehensive data ecosystem. Therefore, all partners involved in Work Package 3 are dealing with the challenges of finding, retrieving, processing and storing the data needed for the task. Among the most pressing issues there is the variability of data formats not only across countries but also across time. For example, parliamentary data may be available in a specific format only for some legislatures, while in TWIN4DEM we plan to cover the time period between 2010 and 2024, and we need to have a balanced set of data for the whole time span. Likewise, all political parties and positions should be equally represented in the data. 

Paradoxically, two additional challenges are data scarcity and data overflow. For example, while Twitter/X has been a popular communication channel used by politicians across Europe, this is not the case in Hungary, for which we will have to implement a different strategy to retrieve MPs’ public statements. On the other hand, sometimes the available data are just too much to be meaningfully processed to identify examples of aggrandisement. For instance, the number of regulative or administrative acts issued by ministers, prefects or mayors for the French use case is 245,500 documents, and this accounts only for a portion of all legislative data we will process in TWIN4DEM for France. In this case, we therefore need to narrow down the scope of our analysis by identifying a subcorpus with documents that in terms of topics, structure and linguistic expressions are likely to signal aggrandisement. This selection is driven by the domain experts in our consortium and requires a different strategy for each use case. By combining political scientists’ knowledge and a plurality of NLP techniques, we aim at describing and unveiling the “language of aggrandizement” in statutory documents. 

What comes next:

Despite current efforts, the output concerning WP3 data will provide a unique resource to the scientific community, data scientists, journalists, political organisations, activists, and more generally to all citizens interested in monitoring political activity. Indeed, while there have been initiatives to interlink metadata concerning politicians’ profiles, their activity in Parliament and biographical information, in TWIN4DEM we will make available a much richer database where politicians’ statements on social media will be aligned with their speeches in parliament, voting behaviour and much more. This will open new research directions to investigate the gap between politicians’ online behaviour and their statements in Parliament, their attitude with respect to their party orientation, their distance from other MPs. Novel NLP approaches will be enabled by this textual resource to detect executive aggrandisement, offer new perspectives on political opinions and make cross-country comparisons.

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In this video interview, the TWIN4DEM Ethics Manager discusses the role of ethics in the project and the importance of ensuring that research activities are carried out responsibly and transparently.

The conversation highlights how ethical considerations are integrated across the project, including research design, data handling, and stakeholder engagement. It also explains why maintaining high ethical standards is essential when addressing topics related to democracy, governance, and executive aggrandisement.

This interview is part of the TWIN4DEM video series, which presents key project roles, research themes, and the broader impact of the initiative.

In this first video interview of the TWIN4DEM series, the project coordinator presents the vision and objectives of the project. The discussion introduces the motivation behind TWIN4DEM and explains how the consortium aims to advance research on executive aggrandisement and democratic governance.

The interview outlines the project’s approach to strengthening scientific excellence through international collaboration, interdisciplinary research, and the use of advanced analytical methods. It also highlights the broader relevance of the project for understanding contemporary democratic challenges and supporting evidence-based policy discussions.

Through this video series, TWIN4DEM will share insights from project partners, researchers, and stakeholders involved in the initiative, offering perspectives on key research themes, activities, and expected outcomes.