Three-stage approach

First, VALPOP will collect data on societal networks and public goods in a contemporary and historical context. Based on this dataset, the project will investigate how sub-strata of society manage to use their networks to absorb public goods and transform them into club goods, i.e. goods with an excluding element, focusing on the role that populist politicians play in this transformation.

This enhanced knowledge will enable the project to provide recommendations for measures to enhance governance, auditing, reporting, and civic participation in the context of public goods, thereby reducing the risk of absorbing the utility of public goods into elite groups.

Data generation

The project will collect data from news articles, social media, corporate reports, local and national variations in the rule of law such as electoral rules, policies and regulations with the aim to produce a dataset of societal networks, their levels of populism, and the value of public goods over the last ten years. This will be achieved by developing a tool for identifying network relations in unstructured text material.

Focus is on the four public goods:

  • Biodiversity: harmful emissions, quality of ecosystems, expenditure on environmental protection
  • Public infrastructure: extensiveness and quality of railway lines, roads, and waterways
  • Free press & access to information: expenditure on media access, number of journalists and media outlets, and social media usage
  • Education: educational attainment of a country’s population and the state of its education system

Knowledge enhancement

The generated data will be analysed and combined with experimental studies of public goods valuation to enhance knowledge about how societal networks affect the distribution and valuation of public goods.

Several methods will be used to construct networks of societal actors and their relations from textual data, quantify populism of individual and societal actors, characterise network structure, interconnection and populist positioning, and analyse the valuation of public goods and discussions on public goods across time.

Statistical analysis and econometric modelling, i.e. application of statistical and mathematical models to economic data, will be used to explain public goods outcomes as a function of societal networks and the rule of law, as well as changes in the value of public goods based on events in society such as war, climate changes or technological developments.