During Period 1 (March 2025–February 2026), VALPOP established its full operational and scientific foundations across three active work packages. WP1 (Project Management) and WP5 (Communication, Dissemination, and Exploitation) established the necessary infrastructure for project management and D/C/E activities.
Under WP2 (Dataset Generation), the project achieved all three milestones and one formal data deliverable foreseen for this period. Milestone M1 (Data Conceptualisation Propositions Approved, April 2025) established the theoretical framework that defines key constructs (public goods, societal network actors, network ties, populism, and the rule of law) at the individual, firm, regional, and national levels of analysis. Milestone M2 (Data Collection Pilot Study Approved) confirmed that the data architecture assembled across the four thematic domains (societal networks, media, institutional quality, and populism) was methodologically sound and provided a robust empirical foundation for full-scale data integration and analysis. The collection of all primary datasets necessary to complete the project was finalised in November 2025 with the purchase of a comprehensive Factiva news corpus, complementing secondary datasets already secured (OECD, Eurobarometer, V-DEM, World Governance Indicators, Polity, and regional authority data, among others). Scoping and evaluation of additional supplementary datasets that could further enrich the project’s empirical base proceed continuously. As part of this data collection effort, UIBK generated a Google Trends-based measure of the online issue salience of public goods across European countries, designated the globaltrends Public Goods Salience Index (PGSI), and updated a Google Trends-based measure of socio-political risk. Both datasets were made openly available under a CC-BY-4.0 license. Deliverable D2.1 (Data Storage of Cleaned Data, November 2025) documented the full data infrastructure, stored across UGRAZ’s high-performance computing environment and WU servers. Milestone M3 (text2network Prototype Tool Running, August 2025) demonstrated that the Joint Entity–Relation Extraction pipeline successfully transforms unstructured text corpora into provenance-aware graph structures, with all unit tests passed. First test networks were extracted and presented at the General Assembly in February 2026.
Although WP3 (Knowledge Enhancement) is formally scheduled to commence in Month 13 (March 2026) and WP4 (Policy Recommendation Definition) in Month 19 (September 2026), both of which fall outside the first reporting period, the consortium took deliberate initial steps in each work package ahead of their respective intended start dates. This preparatory work was undertaken to lay the groundwork for their smooth and timely progression. Under WP3, CBS compiled an internal repository of academic literature relevant to the project’s thematic focus, covering rule-of-law-based governance, public goods, populism, and societal networks, in order to foster internal synergies across beneficiaries and establish a foundation for cross-work-package integration. Under WP4, the consortium held policy-focused conversations with members and non-members of the External Expert Advisory Board to gather independent perspectives on the policy landscape, and initiated early engagement with practitioners in public administration to ensure that the project’s forthcoming policy recommendations are grounded in identified policy needs from the outset. These early activities, spanning the full breadth of the consortium, have already contributed to seven VALPOP-related publications, comprising six journal articles and a dedicated feature in the EIBA newsletter, demonstrating the scientific productivity generated even before the project’s formal analytical phases.
