Politus · AI-based Data Platform for Fair Social Policies

The Politus Project will assess the commercial viability of proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technology for AI-based data-driven fair social policymaking. The project will verify the innovation potential of computational social science and policy-related novel methods from the PI’s ERC-funded Emerging Welfare Project (https://emw.ku.edu.tr). To deliver the technical and commercial proof of concept, the PI will establish the Politus Analytics Company, which will offer an AI-based data platform and fair data-driven policymaking consultancy services to two main client personas - political parties and municipalities. The Politus Project will address two interconnected problems of opposition political parties and municipalities in Turkey and other emerging markets regarding social policy making: (1) populist governments gain political advantage by abusing public social policies with the aid of big data, which disables opposition parties and municipalities to develop competitive electoral strategies (2) These big data sources are not available to non-governmental stakeholders, including opposition parties and municipalities, indicating a government-led information gap which opposition parties and municipalities cannot fill with traditional survey polling methods. The Politus project will develop an AI-based innovation that combines quantitative and computational methods in order to create a data platform that delivers representative, valid, instant, real-time, multi-country and multi-language panel data on key political and social trends, which will be used to design fair social policies for opposition parties and municipalities. Politus will serve its clients (municipalities and political parties) (i) the data and tools to pinpoint exact discretionary and clientelistic allocation of social policies (ii) data and insight to understand the needs and wants of the citizens and gain electoral advantage and (iii) the design of fair social policies.