The aim of VALPOP is to investigate how populism influences the availability of public goods in Europe. The project takes a unique approach, starting from the question of how populist politics influence social networks in media, business, and politics, and then moving to how such networks constrain and support the creation and distribution of public goods. These public goods include education, public infrastructure, biodiversity, free press & access to information.

The first task for the VALPOP project consists of an ambitious data collection effort that captures social networks in media, business, and politics. Here, the project will use the latest methods from computational social sciences and apply them to large-scale media, company, and political data. From this data, VALPOP will link the networks to public goods and investigate the value that society allocates to the latter. The researchers expect this value to depend on the general availability of the public goods.

Based on the insights, the VALPOP project will produce research papers and provide policy briefs for decision makers in the European Union and worldwide. Flanking the research and policy outputs, the VALPOP project will have extensive community, policy engagement activities, and research conferences, bringing together leading researchers, policymakers, NGOs, and other stakeholders from around Europe and the rest of the world.

The VALPOP consortium consists of nine partners from 6 countries and is led by the University of Innsbruck. VALPOP is one of the first social science projects under the Horizon Europe scheme to include a university in New Zealand which has recently become an associated country under the Horizon Europe scheme.

“The VALPOP project contributes to making a significant step forward in understanding the complex relationship between populism and public goods. Our project investigates a fundamental challenge for participative democratic governance. Coordinating this diverse team of young, talented researchers is an incredible opportunity to shape policy recommendations that could have a lasting impact on European democracy”, states Project Manager Harald Puhr, Assistant Professor of International Management at the University of Innsbruck, Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism.

With a grant of EUR 2.99 million, the project will run from 1 March 2025 until 28 February 2029.