Impact of disruptive events on attitudes on science and democracy in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England and Denmark/Sweden

ongoing

How do disruptive events shape the development of ideas on science and democracy? The question is of utmost importance in our world today as we face an increasing frequency of disruptive events, such as pandemics or wars. To gain a long-run understanding of the fundamental factors that link disruptive events to changes in the development of ideas on science and democracy, the IDEAS-SEED (henceforth IDEAS) project will explore natural experiments in history. Specifically, it will study two university pairs in early-modern Europe that were highly similar in institutions and composition of their student body, yet got treated by plague, warfare, and famine at different times each. The first pair is the University of Oxford and Cambridge in England and the second pair is the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Lund University in Sweden. The study will cover the timespan of 1600-1720, the time of the Scientific Revolution and competing ideas between liberal Parliamentarianism and kingly absolutism. To quantify ideas, the project will match students at these universities to their publication titles. Then, using state-of-the art techniques in natural language processing and AI, the project will classify the topics of students' publications and identify students' ideological stances. To ensure accuracy free from present-day bias, the study will fine-tune an LLM on historical data. The fine-tuned LLM will be publicly shared and will also be an outcome of the IDEAS project. Overall, the IDEAS project will use a set of natural experiments to explore how disruptive events shaped the development of ideas on science and democracy at the time of the Scientific Revolution and the first writings on liberal democracy- thereby studying the origin of the scientific and democratic beliefs of our modern societies.