Narratives and cleavage politics: How narratives express and shape political

Abstract

The AI-Political Machines project and the Putting the DSA Into Practice project, both funded by the Project Liberty Institute at the médialab, Sciences Po, are organising a seminar exploring the relationship between computational approaches to political narratives and theories of political cleavages. 

Drawing on the following works:

• Pournaki, Armin. Conflicting Narratives and Polarization on Social Media. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.15600 (2025).
• Olbrich, Eckehard, and Sven Banisch. "The Rise of Populism and the Reconfiguration of the German Political Space." Frontiers in Big Data 4 (2021): 731349.
• Gidron, Noam, and Thomas Tichelbaecker. The European Ideological Space in Voters' Own Words. Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Presenter 

Eckehard Olbrich is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Sciences, at Leipzig, Germany. He has worked at the frontier between applied mathematics and social sciences for over two decades, and has notably led Horizon projects “Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Space” and “Social Media for Democracy: Understanding the Causal Mechanisms of Digital Citizenship” (some4dem.eu).

Practical information

This seminar will be held in person and in English, on Thursday, July 9, 2026, from 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM, in room K.011, 1 Place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin, 75007 Paris.