In today’s hyperconnected world, states are confronted with the global challenge of responding to potentially disruptive online communications, such as terrorist propaganda and fake news. In Russia, these threats have been instrumentalized to legitimate a dramatic decline in internet freedom, leading Human Rights Watch to conclude, that “[s]tate intrusion in media affairs has reached a level not seen in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.” Scholars have investigated the curtailment of internet freedom in contemporary Russia, drawing attention to its infrastructural, economic, regulatory and foreign policy aspects. Scholarship thus far has neglected to examine how the Russian government legitimates and cultivates popular support for these policies. Controlling public opinion may well be the decisive factor in Russia’s “success” in expanding internet censorship without arousing popular resistance. This research project will study how the internet and its regulation are framed in political and media discourses. It asks what role the mobilisation of affect plays in legitimating censorship and surveillance. Employing a mixed methods, case-study approach, it will analyse how affective frames are produced by policymakers, how they are translated and disseminated in state and (semi-) independent media, and how they resonate in social media and online debates.

SepaRope is the first empirically-grounded and comparative project rethinking the theory and practices of Separation of powers in present-day European Union. It addresses the very core of ‘democratic governance in a turbulent age’ and connects to all themes of the call. Separation of powers, the classic model of decision-making, entrusts different state functions to different branches (legislative, executive, judiciary) and serves the double purpose of ensuring collective will-formation and control of those in power. The polyarchic multilevel nature of the EU is not easily reconciled with the separation-of-powers-model, either at EU or national level. SepaRope demonstrates in combined horizontal and vertical inquiries how recent economic and political developments affect the EU’s institutional framework and the anchoring of EU decision-making in national legitimacy. It combines conceptual constitutional analysis with empirical research in three fields (Economic and Monetary Union, migration, trade), in which EU decision-making is controversial, rights-sensitive and illustrative of recent power shifts. Working package 1 develops a joint conceptual framework for identifying and examining will-formation and control structures. WP2-4 conduct autonomous but interlinked empirical and legal-analytical studies of the three branches in the three policy fields, respectively, exposing ever-increasing ‘grey areas’ of diffuse, ring-fenced, and informalised public power. WP2-4 demonstrate the three branches’ mutually constitutive nature and contingency of power shifts. WP5 makes concrete innovative and practically viable suggestions to EU and national institutional actors on how will-formation and control structures can be strengthened in the polyarchic multilevel EU. Stakeholders are involved as interviewees and participants.

INDIGO is a project on pressing issues affecting the future of democratic governance in Europe and the relation between the individual and the public sphere. INDIGO undertakes a structured analysis and develops an innovative approach to analysing and addressing the impact of digitalisation of the multi-jurisdictional implementation of policies in Europe through joint information systems and the use of advanced machine learning systems based on algorithms on possibilities of steering of decision-making by democratic legislation, individual participation, the protection of fundamental rights and the enforcement of the rule of law through independent judicial review. The objectives and outcome are, first, to map the profoundly transformative impact of innovative information technologies on rule-making and decision-making procedures and their impact on constitutional values enshrined in EU public law. Second, to develop future-proof regulatory approaches to realising these values in an age of technological innovation. INDIGO will thereby develop pathways to ensure that the use of information technology will both enhance the rule of law, democracy, transparency and the protection of fundamental individual rights as well as efficiency in problem solving and provision of public goods. INDIGO cuts across themes 3, 4 and 5 having as subjects inter alia democracy and information, expertise and the locus of engagement influencing public decision-making and questions of the nature of their authority and accountability. The consortium will closely work together in working groups with legal scholars, STS social scientists and Computer Science experts, led as PI by the originator and coordinator of the ReNEUAL project.

The CrimScapes project explores the expanding application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality as both responses to, and producers of, the politics of threat and uncertainty that are currently expanding across the European region. Given the inherent tensions between democratic processes and ever-expanding legal regulations, the project investigates this growing reliance on criminal technologies and institutions as a challenge to the participatory nature of democratic societies, and as possible symptoms and causes of the general sense of turbulence that has come to dominate much of economic, social and political life. It works to analytically grasp the motivations behind, and challenges and implications of, criminalisation for the variety of actors and practices that (re-)shape entangled crimscapes - i.e. landscapes of criminalisation. With the support of secondary literature, archival research and interviews, project members will develop - for a variety of publics - CrimeLines (i.e. genealogical timelines) of seven European crimscapes (of drug use, migration, sex work, surrogacy, the prison context, LGBT identities, and hate speech). Additional ethnographic fieldwork will help to conceptualise - in publications and an EthnoGraphic Novel - the strategies, relations and citizenship dynamics of the implicated actors as they navigate democratic participation and freedoms with legal regulation and measures of crime control. Extracting from this empirical data, researchers will then highlight and open for discussion - with policy makers and other stakeholders - documented dilemmas of democratic governance so as to enhance the lived realities, rights-claims and desired futures of all implicated actors.

Helping individuals to behave more healthily is vital to preventing cardiovascular disease. Thanks to low costs and broad reach, digital behaviour change interventions may be a viable option for population level prevention efforts. Current digital interventions fall short of that goal however, as they do not reliably change behaviour. While there is a wealth of evidence on which behaviour change techniques (BCTs) effectively translate behavioural intentions into action, there has been surprisingly little consideration of which BCTs support the motivational processes that underlie individuals? decisions to enact behavioural changes and engage with (digital) behaviour change interventions in the first place. A Rubicon grant will allow me to fill this gap in the literature within the Department of Social Research (DSR) at the University of Helsinki. Using my expertise in literature synthesis (systematic reviewing, meta-analysis), I will first identify which BCTs are most important in supporting motivation for health behaviour change. I will then draw on the DSR?s vast knowledge of human-computer interactions, usability and computerised gaming to develop the identified BCTs into motivational components of a smartphone app, and examine how combinations of these BCTs contribute to motivation for change, sustained engagement with the app, and increases in physical activity. Keywords: behaviour change; motivation; physical activity; meta-analysis; digital interventions