SOSEC

Which sentiments prevail within our societies? What are the drivers of polarization? Where do the dividing lines run? An innovative research design makes it possible to capture the mood of a society and anticipate resulting, potentially harmful tipping points. Possible developments and threats to democracy in our society can thus be illustrated and predicted. As a result, effective countermeasures for future crisis situations can be developed. Using representative panel surveys and agent-based models of opinion dynamics, “Social Sentiment in Times of Crises” (SOSEC) continuously monitors and evaluates how social sentiment unfolds in critical situations. It is a quantitative social sentiment survey unprecedented in this form. In the simple and low-threshold approach, 4,500 participants (1,500 in Germany and 3,000 in the U.S.) were asked to answer the same questions once a week between November 2022 and April 2023. The FZI plays a pivotal role in this project such as coordinating the data collection and analysis via a questionnaire custom-developed for SOSEC. Matching panel data with news events extracted from the Event Registry platform gives our researchers a better insight into the relation between political or social news events on the one hand and collective social sentiment on the other hand.