The Politus Project will assess the commercial viability of proprietary natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technology for AI-based data-driven fair social policymaking. Fair social policy refers to public welfare programs designed and assigned to citizens based on material need, as opposed to discretionary allocations on the basis of citizens’ political characteristics and behaviour. The project will verify the innovation potential of the novel computational social science and policy-related methods from the PI’s ERC-funded Emerging Welfare Project (emw.ku.edu.tr).

The Politus Project will address two interconnected problems of opposition political parties and municipalities in Turkey and other emerging market economies inside and outside of Europe regarding social policy making: (1) populist governments gain political advantage by abusing public social policies with the aid of big data, which undermines the capacity of opposition parties and municipalities to develop competitive electoral strategies. (2) These big data sources are not available to non-governmental stakeholders, including opposition parties and municipalities, indicating a government-led information gap, which opposition parties and municipalities cannot fill with traditional survey polling methods.

website: politusanalytics.com