How can simulations help us understand democracy better? This question was at the centre of the EuropeanCity² webinar “Simulating Democracy with Quantum Computational Social Science”, now available to watch online.
The event gathered 39 participants and gave the EC² team an opportunity to personally present the project’s goals, progress and next research steps to an audience interested in democratic innovation, voting systems and computational social science.
The full recording is available online for everyone interested in democratic innovation, voting systems and computational social science.
Why Simulate Democracy?
Democracy is usually discussed through opinions, values and political debate. EC² adds another important layer: experimentation.
Dr. Luis Razo from EISM Science in Management, scientific coordinator of the EC² project, opened the webinar by explaining the main idea behind the research. Modern democracies face serious challenges, including polarisation, declining trust and difficulties in collective decision-making.
EC² explores whether computational tools can help study these challenges in a safer and more systematic way. Instead of testing democratic reforms directly in society, researchers can first test different scenarios in simulations.
This allows them to ask practical questions: What happens when voting rules change? How do people express strong preferences? Can new voting methods reveal information that standard voting hides?
From Voting Rules to Human Behaviour
Dr. Nicolas Marc Simon Legrand from Aarhus University presented work on artificial agents, uncertainty and voting decisions.
His presentation showed how simulations can become more realistic when artificial agents are designed to act with limited information, uncertain beliefs and different levels of confidence – just as people often do in real life.
He also discussed the use of large language models in simulations. This area is promising, but it must be approached carefully, as such models can reproduce biases. Understanding these limits is essential before using them to represent real voters or citizens.
How Preferences Form and Change
Prof. Jan Lorenz from Constructor University focused on opinion dynamics and preference formation.
Opinion dynamics helps researchers understand how people influence each other, how views spread and why societies may move towards agreement, division or polarisation.
Agent-based modelling makes it possible to explore how large collective patterns can emerge from many small individual interactions. This perspective is important for EC² because democratic decisions are not only about counting votes. They are also about how people form opinions before voting and how those opinions change over time.
What Changes When Voting Systems Change?
Dr. Minsu Jang from Aarhus University brought the discussion closer to everyday decision-making.
Using a simple example of choosing a restaurant, he showed that the same group of people can reach different outcomes depending on how their preferences are collected. A single-choice vote, ranked voting or a system that measures the strength of preferences may each reveal something different.
This is one of the core questions in EC²: institutions do not only aggregate preferences. They also shape how people express them.
Dr. Jang also presented early work comparing standard voting with quadratic voting, a method that allows people to show not only what they prefer, but how strongly they prefer it.
The Quantum Side of Democratic Research
Prof. Eliahu Cohen from Bar-Ilan University presented the quantum voting part of EC².
He introduced the connection with Arrow’s impossibility theorem, a key result in social choice theory showing that no voting system can perfectly satisfy all desirable democratic conditions at once.
The EC² team is exploring whether quantum approaches can open new ways of thinking about this problem. This does not mean that quantum computing is ready to “solve democracy”. Rather, it means that researchers are testing whether quantum information can offer new tools for studying collective decision-making.
Turning Research into Software
Nikola Grunchevski from Hybrid Core presented the software development side of the project.
He explained how EC² research is being transformed into a simulation platform – a virtual city populated by artificial citizens. These citizens can hold opinions, observe their environment, make decisions and vote.
The first complete version of the simulation engine is already working. It allows the project team to run controlled simulations and prepare for more advanced features, including opinion dynamics, social influence, quantum voting and large-scale testing.
Aarhus as a Real-World Democratic Pilot
The webinar ended with a practical city perspective from Frederik Ingvardt Pedersen from Aarhus Municipality.
Aarhus plays an important role in EC² as a real-world setting for democratic experimentation. Frederik presented the planned city budgeting pilot, where citizens will be invited to test different voting methods in situations inspired by real public spending choices.
The pilot will help explore key questions for local democracy: Do different voting methods produce different outcomes? Do people perceive the process as fair? Can better information support better collective decisions?
What Comes Next for EC²?
The webinar showed that EC² is now entering an exciting stage. The project has built a strong theoretical foundation and is moving towards experiments, software tools and pilot activities.
The long-term aim is not to replace democratic debate, but to better understand how different decision-making systems work before they are applied in practice.
By combining social science, computer simulation, quantum research, software development and municipal experimentation, EC² offers a new way to study democracy: not only as a political idea, but also as a system that can be observed, tested and improved.
Watch the Full Webinar
Thank you to all speakers and participants who joined the EC² webinar and contributed to this important discussion.
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