The “Construction of Groups in Politics” (CONSTRUCT) project is investigating a new theory on the relationship between political parties and social groups.

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A team of students from the Institute of Social Sciences has won the Runner-Up Award in the ‘Technical Excellence’ category at the Hertie School’s data4good Festival in Berlin. With their project ‘North Rhine-WestFEARia’, they impressed the jury with their innovative data analysis in the service of the common good.

At this year’s hackathon, a total of 80 Bachelor’s students in 16 teams from 11 European countries competed against one another. The participants, most of whom came from the fields of computer and data sciences, supplemented by a few social scientists, worked on two different datasets with a focus on socially relevant issues.

Carlotta Steimke, Charlotte Keyßler and Michel Janssen turned their attention to the Bertelsmann foundation’s ReligionMonitor – a survey on religion and social cohesion – and developed an ambitious research project based on it. Under the title “North Rhine-WestFEARia – Perceived Threats in Population and State Parliaments”, the students investigated the extent to which threats perceived by the population are also addressed in the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament.

The methodological strength of the project lay in the combination of different data sources: the students analysed speeches in the state parliament using a zero-shot BERT classifier and merged these findings with the survey data from the ReligionMonitor. In doing so, they created a new, merged dataset that, for the first time, systematically links these two perspectives – public perception and parliamentary communication.

In addition to the ‘Technical Excellence’ category, prizes were also awarded at the data4good Festival in the areas of ‘Data Storytelling’ and ‘Social Impact’. The festival highlights the growing importance of data-driven approaches to societal challenges and promotes interdisciplinary exchange among young researchers in Europe