Arqus themed day at the “Data, democracy and the new social fabric” summer school

The AI&DT Living Lab had a thematic day as part of the “Data, democracy, and the new social fabric“ summer school at Graz University that took place from 15 to 26 September 2025. 

This thematic day focused on exploring democracy from interdisciplinary and computational perspectives, with sessions featuring complementary talks that bridged the humanities and complexity science to encourage the debate among participants from diverse academic backgrounds.

The day started with Professor Karoline Wiesner with a lecture entitled “Democracy as a Complex System: Foundations, Challenges, and Computational Insights. “ In this talk, she presented democracy as a dynamic and adaptive system, highlighting how concepts such as stability, resilience, and emergence can shed light on the robustness and fragility of democratic institutions.

The lecture combined theoretical insights with computational practice: participants engaged in a hands-on Python tutorial using dimensionality reduction methods to analyze high-dimensional political data. This exercise illustrated how computational tools can make complex political dynamics more interpretable, bridging theory and empirical research.

Following this, Professor Étienne Brown made two complementary talks. The first “Why rule over ourselves? An introduction to philosophical theories of democracy,” introduced key debates on democracy’s moral and epistemic value, that led him to contrasting instrumentalist and non-instrumentalist theories, examining thinkers from Aristotle and Plato to contemporary philosophers such as Elizabeth Anderson and Thomas Christiano, and inviting participants to reflect on whether democracy’s legitimacy rests on good outcomes or on its intrinsic moral principles. 

His second talk, “Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere: Current Challenges” explored how digital technologies reshape public discourse, focusing on issues such as misinformation, polarisation, and algorithmic governance. Brown argued that the increasing influence of opaque digital infrastructures raises urgent questions of accountability and citizen control in democratic societies.