Policy labs in Europe: Political innovation, structure and content analysis on twitter

Abstract

Recent years have seen a veritable boom in the creation of policy labs. These institution-based innvation laboratories aim to open up the processes of public policy design to the social stakeholders involved. In 2016, the European Union Policy Lab commissioned a report that identified 64 such laboratories in Europe. In the present study, we use network analysis to reveal the structure of the relationships between the 42 of these labs that have a presence on Twitter. We then conduct a content analysis of their tweets to identify the topics of interest. Our results describe a fragmented, country-based network and the principal concepts and key issues addressed by these institutions.