The Great Experiment: How to Make Diverse Democracies Work
- Actualité Sciences Po
A conference in the framework of the Rendez-vous de la Recherche.
Democracy is a fragile pact which could be broken at any time, especially when it is crossed by deep internal divides. How to bridge the fragmentations within diverse democracies enough for them to remain stable and functional? This is the major pressing question that Yascha Mounk will address during this talk based on his latest bestselling book The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure.
Professor Mounk’s presentation will be followed by comments by Sciences Po’s faculty members Janie Pelabay and Annabelle Lever.
Yascha Mounk is a political scientist, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. His book is considered a major contribution to reflection on democracies and the dangers they incur. Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. Despite all the dangers, Yasha Mounk's message is not pessimistic, showing us that the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better.
Janie Pélabay is Research Fellow at the Sciences Po’s Center of Political Research (CEVIPOF). She investigates the challenges posed by pluralism to liberal democracy, and contemporary debates on state neutrality, multiculturalism, identity politics and patriotism.
Annabelle Lever is Research Fellow at the Sciences Po’s Center of Political Research (CEVIPOF). She conducts research on democratic theory, contemporary political theory, ethics and public policy, on security, privacy and intellectual property.
The debate will be moderated by Sergei Guriev, Provost and Professor of Economics, Sciences Po.
25 octobre 2022 de 19:00 à 20:30 - Amphithéâtre Jacques Chapsal - 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007, Paris
"The New Free University" by Bruno Latour
- Actualité Sciences Po
Clément de Chaisemartin Awarded an ERC Grant
- Actualité Sciences Po
Academic Freedom Week - September 14th-16th, 2022
- Actualité Sciences Po
All around the world, there are efforts to curtail the freedom to teach, study and conduct research. The threat may come from political and economic authorities, from the evolution of public opinion or from stakeholders within universities themselves.
As we continue to champion the cause of our colleague Fariba Adelkhah, from 14 to 16 September, Sciences Po will be hosting a week dedicated to examining all aspects of academic freedom. A series of round table discussions will bring together students, researchers, academics and university presidents to explore a variety of perspectives on the issue.
Programme
14 septembre - Les atteintes à la liberté de recherche et d'enseignement en contexte autoritaire
17h -19h30
Cette table ronde réunira des acteurs et des témoins qui évoqueront les atteintes à la liberté d'enseignement et de recherche dans différents pays aux pratiques autoritaires (Russie, Iran, Chine, Brésil...).
15 septembre - La liberté académique en France et dans les démocraties libérales : nouveaux enjeux, nouveaux défis
14h-17h
Parce que la liberté académique se retrouve aujourd’hui au cœur de nombreuses polémiques, cette table ronde vise avant tout à lever les malentendus et confusions qui obscurcissent le débat. La liberté académique n’est pas la liberté d’expression, chacune a ses propres justifications et ses propres régulations, non sans frictions toujours possibles. Qu’est-ce alors qu’un bon modèle de confrontation des idées sur un campus universitaire ? Comment garantit-on l’indispensable exercice du libre débat sans soustraire les campus à la nécessaire prévention des discours de haine ?
September, 15th - Measuring and Advocating for the Academic Freedom Index
5-8 p.m
As part of the Academic Freedom Week, this seminar covers;the topic of the Academic Freedom Index/AFI.
The two main objectives of this seminar are to present the current Academic Freedom Index (AFI) measurement initiatives by explaining the methodology used, the different criteria of its definition, the advantages and disadvantages of this index and to reflect on the concrete uses of the index, its advertisement in particular by universities themselves and the real impact that it could have on the fight for academic freedom.
In the third part introduced by Provost Sergei Guriev, recommendations will be made to Sciences Po on how to make use of the AFI.
September, 16th - Academic Freedom: what do our university communities owe society ?
2.45 - 4 p.m
Speakers:
Michael Ignatieff, Writer, historian, professor and former politician
Sergei Guriev, Provost and Professor at the Department of Economics (Sciences Po)
Silvia Giorguli, Sociologist and President (El Colegio de México)
Zeblon Vilakazi, Vice Chancellor and Principal (University of the Witwatersrand)
Moderator: Vanessa Scherrer, Vice President for International Affairs at Sciences Po
Sergeï Guriev appointed Sciences Po Provost
- Actualité Sciences Po
CIVICA: Exploring synergies in archival policies
- Actualité Sciences Po
Sergei GURIEV appointed to the Institut universitaire de France
- Actualité Sciences Po
Each year, the Institut universitaire de France (IUF) selects new members in the framework of a very selective application campaign. The vocation of the IUR is to promote the development of high-level research in universities and to strengthen interdisciplinarity,
Becoming a laureate requires demonstrating innovative and promising research, but also creativity, leadership and the ability to share the results of one's work with as many people as possible.
Appointed for five years, Sergei Guriev, Full Professor at the Department of Econonomics, Scientific Director of Sciences Po's Master's and PhD programmes in economics, is laureate of the chair for fundamental research and joins the fifteen members of the IUF belonging to our permanent factulty.
Learn more (EN)
U-Multirank 2022: Sciences Po stands out for its international dimension and its research
- Actualité Sciences Po
Created in 2014 by the European Commission to compare universities by taking into account a variety of criteria, U Multirank 2022 evaluated more than 2200 universities in nearly 100 countries. In this sense, it constitutes a public alternative to the major world rankings established by private bodies.
Unlike the latter, U-Multirank is interested in the performance of universities in the variety of their missions: research but also teaching, international openness, knowledge transfer, regional commitment. U-Multirank classifies institutions into five performance levels from A to E for each of the indicators assessed (A expressing "very good" performance and E "poor" performance).
This year, Sciences Po is ranked in group A in several of the areas assessed. The quality of its research is distinguished by the number of citations of the scientific articles of its researchers in the academic literature . U-Multirank also places Sciences Po in the best institution category for its international openness thanks to the internationalization of its permanent faculty and student mobility. U-Multirank also highlights the importance of our investments in digital education.
The research cooperation agreement between Oxford and Sciences Po extends for another four years
- Actualité Sciences Po
May 2022
Sciences Po is pleased to announce the extension of its scientific cooperation with the University of Oxford within the framework of the OxPo network (Oxford-Sciences Po Network) for four additional years, until 2026.
Developed since 2010, this programme organises scientific cooperation between Sciences Po and several departments of the University of Oxford - Politics and International Relations, Social Policy and Intervention, Sociology - as well as with the Oxford Center for European History (OCEH).
Since its launch, OxPo has given the opportunity of carrying out research stays to nearly 60 researchers and more than 80 doctoral and post-doctoral students on both sides of the Channel. These stays have in particular enabled young researchers to considerably strengthen their scientific potential, as evidenced by their impressive academic careers.
OxPo has also allowed for the organisation of numerous high level conferences and the conduct of relevant joint research projects on major topics such as immigration, democracy and Europe, most often from a comparative perspective.
Long live OxPo!
Clément de CHAISEMARTIN nominated "Meilleur jeune économiste"
- Actualité Sciences Po
Inspired by the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark Medal, Le Monde, French daily, and the Cercle des économistes, created the prize in 2000, with a twofold objective: to highlight the work of France’s best young economists (under 41) who have contributed significantly to economic thought and knowledge and to make better known the multiple facets of economic science.
Clément de CHAISEMARTIN is one of three economists, in addition to the laureate, selected by the jury for their work related to applied economics and promoting public debate.
Specialized in economics of education and health economics, and more generally in the field of public policy evaluation, Clément de Chaisemartin is an internationally renowned econometrician. He was nominated for his research which develops new, more robust and transparent public policy evaluation tools, notably natural (or randomized) experiments first pioneered by 2021 Nobel Laureate David Card. Using a comparison between two places, one implementing a policy, e.g. an increase in the minimum wage, while the other does not, fixed effects regression then makes it possible to measure the effect of the policy.
Fariba Adelkhah, three years already...
- Actualité Sciences Po
By Alain Dieckhoff, Director of CERI
This year again, and for the third year, we will mark the sad anniversary of the arrest of our colleague at CERI Fariba Adelkhah, director of research at Sciences Po. On 5 June 2019, Fariba was arrested in Iran, along with Roland Marchal, a CNRS researcher at CERI. Roland was finally released on 20 March 2020, after long diplomatic negotiations and almost nine and a half months of detention. Unfortunately, Fariba remains in detention against her will. Her fate was even further aggravated in 2022, as she was re-incarcerated in Evin Prison in January after having been under house arrest. This re-incarceration was decided under the pretence that she had failed to comply with the terms of her judicial supervision.
As the Support Committee has consistently pointed out, the reality is that Fariba Adelkhah’s five-year sentence, imprisonment, house arrest and arrest itself have never had any grounds whatsoever and constitute iniquitous and unlawful acts. For three years now, Fariba has been subjected to an appalling fate which the academic community at Sciences Po, but also elsewhere in France and abroad, will continue to oppose with tenacity.
Transformations Of and Through Work. Discover the latest Cogito Dossier
- Actualité Sciences Po
CIVICA Excellence Tour
- Actualité Sciences Po
Tribute to Jean-Paul Fitoussi
- Actualité Sciences Po
QS 2022: Sciences Po ranked 3rd best university in the world in "Politics & International Studies"
- Actualité Sciences Po
April 6th, 2022
QS 2022 : For nearly 10 years, QS World University Rankings, which compares more than 1,500 universities worldwide, has consistently confirmed Sciences Po as one of the best higher education and research institutions in the social sciences.
This year, Sciences Po is ranked 3rd in "Politics & International Studies" ahead of the London School of Economics and Political Studies and Princeton University. At the European Union level, Sciences Po is ranked first in this subject.
Worldwide, Sciences Po is ranked 20th in Social Policy and Administration; 31st in Sociology; 34th in Development Studies; 51st in Law; 82nd in Economics & Econometrics
Discover the CIVICA Research blog!
- Actualité Sciences Po
Ghazala Azmat Awarded ERC Grant
- Actualité Sciences Po / © Shutterstock
A New CIVICA Project Involving Sciences Po's Research
- Actualité Sciences Po
A new research project - Pilot Network for Research Ethics and Data Management Training (PiNRED) - launched in the CIVICA framework, includes the participation of Kevin Arceneaux, a Sciences Po Professor in Polical Sciences, affiliated with the Center for Political Research (CEVIPOF).
The purpose of the project is to explore whether it would be possible to build a common infrastructure for ethics compliance with respect to research on human subjects.
The project plans to conduct a strategic scan, across the CIVICA network, of research infrastructure and training in the areas of research ethics (particularly related to human subjects), research data management, and research reproducibility and transparency, especially with regard to the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets).
If there is interest in creating such a collaboration within the CIVICA network, developing a common infrastructure for ethics training and approval would potentially streamline the process and reduce duplicating efforts at each campus. This infrastructure would involve providing training to researchers about what constitutes ethical research practices (e.g., informed consent, respect for persons, etc.), ethical data management practices, and perhaps even a framework for providing ethics approval for proposed research (in the model of the “institutional review board” system used by American universities).
Thomas Crossley, Professor of Economics at the European University Institute leads the project, the Hertie School being a third partner.
More about the winners of CIVICA's research call 2022
Scoping possibility in a nuclear world
- Nagasaki © Shutterstock
To Read: the Latest Cogito Issue
- Actualité Sciences Po
Opening the Boundaries of the Academic Job Market
- Actualité Sciences Po
8 new research projects launched in the framework of the partnership between Sciences Po and the McCourt Institute
- Actualité Sciences Po
In the framework of the partnership between Sciences Po and the McCourt Institute established in June 2021 and devoted to the study, decryption and clarification of the major issues of the common good that are played out around new technologies, eight research projects have been selected by the Steering Committee :
AI-Political Machines: Do AI systems learn and leverage political opinions of users in recommendations?
directed by Sylvain Parasie et Pedro Ramaciotti Morales, médialab
Can speech govern itself? Regulating content on the Internet from below and from above
directed by Dominique Cardon, médialab
This research will be addressed in two successive calls for proposal. The objective of this preliminary project is to explore how speech regulation in digital discussion spaces can be based on users’ normative expectations. “You shouldn’t talk like that!”, “That’s wrong!”, “We don’t say that!”, “That’s nonsense!”, “It’s false”. Internet users who chat in forums, Facebook groups, or social network comment threads constantly challenge others to assess the legitimacy of speech and the limits of what can be said in public. With the massification of digital audiences and the diversity of speech spaces, it appears increasingly obvious that users do not share the same values regarding what can or cannot be said in public. The objective of this project is to map the differences and tensions between different conceptions of online speech. This proposal sets the framework for a project that brings together five perspectives that we will develop in future calls. The first four research axes propose to confront different perspectives on how users, public opinion, platforms and States define the possibilities and limits of speech in digital spaces. More applied, the fifth research axis will seek to design new types of digital speech spaces. This first proposal is based on an analysis of a large corpus of digital conversations and a set of qualitative and quantitative survey techniques enabling the study of the normative representations of Internet users. In the next phase, we would like to combine this bottom-up approach with the legal debate on the regulation of content within large digital platforms and to design speech spaces architectures allowing users to regulate themselves.
DeCodingDisInfo Ideology and Institutions in the Diffusion of Disinformation in the Digital Era
directed by Jen Schradie, Observatoire sociologique du changement
What shapes whether people receive, believe, and share disinformation? The rise of ‘fake news’ has become an area of deep concern worldwide, raising questions about the role of information in democratic societies. Observers often point to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, based on falsehoods about election results, as a critical turning point in how disinformation has dire consequences. Despite a dramatic increase in disinformation research, a crucial and remaining puzzle is that a large number of people believe fake news claims while only a small number of people (often below 1%) consume fake news in their daily news diet (Allen et al. 2020; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Grinberg et al. 2019; Tsfati et al. 2020). How and why do people report that they trust unverified information if they are not actually consuming this news directly? To understand this empirical disconnect in the diffusion of disinformation in the digital era (3Ds), this mixed-methods research, DeCodingDisInfo advances the state of the art that selects on the dependent variable of digitally visible fake news and top-down levers of distribution. Current scholarship skews toward top-down powerful players: platforms (like Twitter), politicians (like Trump), or policies (like the GDPR). The audience for disinformation, however, is usually viewed as passive individuals without institutional affiliation. This extant research ignores the broader array of everyday bottom-up active media practices and mechanisms of sharing—or not sharing. Instead, DeCodingDisInfo, an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods project, will uncover how information – both fake news and otherwise – circulates in the digital media environment and in offline spaces. Taking a deeply contextualized and community-based approach, our team will harness the power of a two-country comparison and examine how ideology and institutions shape information flows. This will result in publicly available tools to better decode and deconstruct fake news.
GOV-NET: Governance Problems in Decentralized Networks
directed by Michele Fioretti, Department of Economics
Decentralized networks provide users with control over their personal information. Applied to the Internet, decentralization can reduce the market power of dominant firms, as it reduces their ability to learn consumers' preferences. However, information sharing comes with the cost of constantly deciding whether to share information. Since the Internet is not decentralized, there is currently no data about how Internet users share information under decentralization. We, therefore, propose to analyze, estimate, and simulate a model of information sharing in an extensive decentralized network: shareholding of large corporations. We focus on shareholder activism over socially responsible issues to study the evolution of related shareholding information and the reactions of large nodes in the network (shareholders with dominant positions) to examine governance issues related to information sharing in decentralized networks. To do so, we exploit the news flow of digital media as exogenous shocks to shareholder preferences.
Incentivizing Good Digital Governance: Toward a Healthier and More Ethical Online Public Sphere
directed by Kevin Arceneaux et Martial Foucault, CEVIPOF
In this project we propose developing and administering an innovative research design for both understanding how people engage with the online public sphere as well as test interventions that are designed to cultivate healthier and more constructive online behaviors. We plan to do so in the context of the French presidential and legislative elections slated for spring 2022. Following the experience of the last national elections in France, we anticipate that the electoral campaign will be emotionally charged, polarizing, and filled with attempts to spread misinformation. Our research approach will cast a broad net by studying a wide range of attitudes and behavior, both on- and offline.
Role of Science and Politics in Sharing Misinformation: Towards Evidence-based Mechanisms to Curb the Diffusion of Misinformation
directed by Achim Edelmann, médialab
The digital transformation has led to major changes in the information ecosystem. Modern communication platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter have become important media for information dissemination, breaking down centralized structures while blurring boundaries between private and public channels. Unfortunately, these platforms have also been misused to share inaccurate or inflammatory content. As of today, we—science—have failed to provide the knowledge needed to successfully counter this phenomenon. We lack the evidence needed to design and implement successful interventions. This project will therefore identify mechanisms that substantively and effectively govern the spread of misinformation and related effects such as polarization.
Towards a New Digital Rule of Law
directed by Séverine Dusollier, Law School
How can the values and rights needed to sustain democracies and the common good be upheld and ensured in our digital world? What is the role of the law in doing so? Sciences Po’s Law School Towards a New Digital Rule of Law project will assess the legal governance/regulation of the Internet and of some of its technologies in identified case studies in order to develop a new line of research investigating and experimenting the necessary role of law in current internet evolution. The School of law intends to develop this line of research for the years to come around different specific issues challenging the rule of law. In the next three years, the Project will focus on examining the value and of constitutional law concepts for a digital rule of law, how to govern AI to make it compatible with democracies, and how to use infrastructures to govern and how to govern infrastructures to address data inequality and shape a less concentrated web. All projects will be developed emphasizing three main pillars (1) hosting and supporting rigorous academic research focused on relevant governance challenges;(2) channeling the research into early action and early impact through the law school’s clinical program; and (3) implementing public outreach, by hosting conferences and workshops where different stakeholders can discuss and influence policy on time-contingent issues.
Slowing disinformation on social media: digital literacy, fact checking and digital governance
directed by Julia Cagé, Sergei Guriev et Émeric Henry
Fariba Adelkhah imprisoned again
- Actualité Sciences Po
January 12th 2022
It is with great shock and indignation that we have been informed that Fariba Adelkhah, research director at CERI Sciences Po and winner of the Irène Joliot Curie Woman Scientist of the Year Award in 2020, has been re-imprisoned in the prison of Evin. She was arrested in Tehran on 5 June 2019, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on trumped-up charges and without any proper trial, and has been under house arrest since October 2020.
The Iranian government is cynically using our colleague for external or internal purposes that remain opaque, and that have nothing to do with her activities. Fariba Adelkhah is a rigorous and independent researcher, and has consequently been a scientific prisoner for over two and a half years.
As the Covid pandemic continues in full swing, the Iranian government is deliberately endangering Fariba Adelkhah’s health and even her life. The death in custody of poet and filmmaker Baktash Abtin last Saturday is evidence of the government's inability or unwillingness to guarantee the safety of its detainees.
We call on the French authorities, the elected representatives of the French Republic, and beyond that the governments and elected representatives of Europe to act to obtain the immediate and unconditional release of their nationals arbitrarily detained by Iran.
Fariba Adelkhah's support committee
Moritz SCHULARICK awarded 2022 Leibniz Prize
- Actualité Sciences Po
Human and social sciences at the bedside of health?
- Actualité Sciences Po