Democracy in Crisis: Using Social Simulation to Explore Policies for Countering Radicalization
摘要
It is widely acknowledgedSgouros N. M. that the rise of radicalization poses major challenges to democratic and open societies as it casts doubt on the legitimacy of decision-making processes, creates polarization that threatens tolerance and consensus building and can motivate the use of violence to promote its ideals. To counter such threats we seek to develop a policy incubation testbed for facilitating the exploration of counter-radicalization policies through the use of agent-based social simulation. To this end, we simulate and comparatively evaluate policy models that combine restriction measures with efforts to increase socialization in the population. Our models are able to deal with various agent networks with different features and dynamics that operate in parallel on the same population. All our policy models have been integrated and are publicly available in Politika, our web-based, policy exploration environment that explains our implementation and allows the user to verify our results and further experiment with ideas for countering radicalization.