Åbo Akademi University

Åbo Akademi University is the only entirely Swedish-speaking University in Finland. It is located both in Åbo (Turku) and Vaasa, with altogether 5,500 students enrolled in undergraduate programmes across four different faculties.

The Social Science Research Institute (Samforsk) is an independent institute within the Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics at Åbo Akademi. Samforsk is located in both Åbo and Vasa and it is part of the larger political science community at Åbo Akademi. Through systematic work, political science at Åbo Akademi has become a leading institution for the scientific study of public opinion in Finland. Through national collaboration with the Universities of Helsinki, Tampere and Turku within the areas of electoral research, population-based experiments deliberative experiments, laboratory experiments and the development of online tools in opinion research, Samforsk is today an internationally well-acknowledged research environment. Political science is currently the only subject area at Åbo Akademi that is acknowledged in the Shanghai academic ranking of world universities (301-400, year 2019).

Samforsk is a central hub in national and international networks concerning research on democratic innovations, deliberative democracy and public opinion. Samforsk coordinates the Finnish national election study and represents Finland in the Research Infrastructure Consortium for Monitoring Electoral Democracy (MEDem) initiative. Since the beginning of 2020, Samforsk leads the FIRIPO-consortium, funded by the Academy of Finland, for the construction of a national research infrastructure for the study of public opinion. The infrastructure also includes a state-ofthe-art facility for experimental research, such as experiments in public deliberation. Led by Professor Kimmo Grönlund, Samforsk also hosts the Future of Democracy: Centre of Excellence in Public Opinion Research (FutuDem), funded by the Åbo Akademi University Foundation during 2019-2023. Kim Strandberg is one of two editors of Journal of Public Deliberation, which is the primary platform for international scholarship on democratic deliberation. Samforsk has extensive international collaboration throughout the academic community working on public opinion and deliberation. Collaboration, which is based on a mutually signed MOU, is particularly active between Samforsk and the Center for Deliberative Democracy, led by Professor James Fishkin at Stanford.

Additionally, Samforsk has a long-standing and continuous academic collaboration with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra and the departments of political science at the universities of Gothenburg and Uppsala in Sweden.

Relevant previous projects

Involving citizens through deliberative processes, 2016-2021, funded by the Academy of Finland (grant number 294411)
Problems in present patterns of long-term decision-making, 2017-2021, funded by the Academy of Finland (grant number 312676)
Foundations of long-term decision-making, 2017-2021, funded by the Academy of Finland (grant number 326662)
Future of Democracy: A Centre of Excellence in Public Opinion Research, 2019-2023, funded by the Åbo Akademi University Foundation, PI Kimmo Grönlund
The Finnish Research Infrastructure for Public Opinion, 2020-2022, funded by the Academy of Finland (grant number 327997)