The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the results of the 2023 ERC Proof of Concept grant scheme, and four research projects in Portugal were approved for funding. Among them was the PolarScopEU project, led by ICS-ULisboa researcher Marina Costa Lobo. This is the first ERC Proof of Concept grant awarded to a social scientist in Portugal.

Only researchers who have previously had projects funded by the ERC are eligible for the Proof of Concept grant scheme. Marina Costa Lobo was awarded a Consolidator grant in 2016 with the MAPLE project - Mapping and Analysing the Politicisation of the EU before and after the Eurozone Crisis. Building on this experience, PolarScopEU will measure and map online political polarisation on social networks in various European countries.

The project proposes to address the impact of online political communication and misinformation on democratic institutions, along with citizens’ unawareness of biases in the political information that they are exposed to. This will be achieved using an application that will be first introduced in Greece, Portugal and Spain for the automated analysis of social media content. It will allow its users to find out more about the online content they consume and which actors are closer to them when it comes to the politicisation of several important issues, such as European Integration, Immigration or the Environment, among many others.

Besides the relevance of the theme in the current political landscape, the innovative nature of the project comes from the tools created to analyse textual data and measure the salience and contestation of different political issues. A database for each country will be periodically updated, with polarisation and issue politicisation scores for an extensive list of national actors, including political parties, news media, and other key opinion makers. These tools will facilitate the comparison of issue politicisation across different countries, political actors and time periods, and will originate an innovative polarisation index of online political communication in EU countries.

This is the sixth ERC funded research project at ICS-ULisboa, a portuguese research and higher education institution that has been consistently praised by international panels for its excellence.