Our society has entered an era where digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) proliferate. Digital technologies and AI can augment or replace human decision-making and may contribute to the public good but also disrupt and threaten it. The impact of data, digitalization, and AI on media and politics affect the very core of democracy. The Digital Democracy Centre (DDC) will develop a new socio-technical, interdisciplinary approach combining theory and methods from social sciences and computer science, to study the impact of digital technology and AI on media, politics, and democracy. One of the largest challenges in this area is that research and new solutions are developed in single disciplines, which neglect the fact that current challenges are technological and social, legal, and ethical in nature.

Mission and Ambitions

The DDC aims to:

• be a leading research centre around ‘digital democracy’;
• develop an interdisciplinary, socio-technological perspective on digital democracy;
• conduct innovative research following a societally relevant research agenda;
• train and socialize a successful cohort of new scholars;
• have a voice in public and policy discussions;

Embedding

The DDC will be a prioritized centre of research excellence at the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences and advance both a core of interdisciplinary research excellence and a number of research partnerships reaching into the Faculty departments. The DDC will seek cooperation with SDU-networks that do research in digitalization, media, democracy and political institutions, and political and social behavior. Research will be organised in interdisciplinary teams and projects. The DDC will foster “born inter-disciplinaries”: researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds, holding complementary competencies, mostly recruited from Social Sciences, Law and Computer Science.