New research group Ideas and Institutions (IDIS) was launched in early 2025. Our intention is to bring together political scientists with an interest to institutions in their various forms and moments of change. The mission of IDIS is to create a community around our shared research interests and spark conversations through various activities.
Here are some of the highlights about the past spring at IDIS.
IDIS at home
IDIS has been honored to host multiple visiting researchers and visitors to our seminar. In April IDIS hosted an associate professor Taru Haapala from the Autonomous University of Madrid who also gave a guest lecture titled Political knowledge. Why studying institutionalised opposition matters. Later in June, Academy Research Fellow Jukka Syväterä from the University of Helsinki visited our seminar and discussed about his project, The Authority of Science in the Politics of Parliamentary Policymaking: Evolving Practices of Enacting and Contesting Science.
IDIS regularly organizes seminars where IDIS researchers or visiting researchers present their work. In the future, IDIS will inform about its upcoming events regularly on university email channels.
We had also another visit in April as associate professor Meng-Hsuan Chou from NTU Singapore visited us. PhD researcher in Sociology from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Lise Moawad has been visiting us from April to June in our research group. During her visit she has participated actively in IDIS activities and presented her work, for instance, in the doctoral research seminar.
In April BRIDPOL-project that in Helsinki resides under the IDIS umbrella organized a two-day workshop on the hybridity and algorithmic governance. During the first day our researchers Ville Aula (co-authored work with other IDIS colleagues Jaakko Hillo and Tero Erkkilä), Joel Hänninen, Konstantinos Kostas and Juho Mölsä presented their research on algorithmic governance. The topics included (de)regulating public sector AI (Mölsä), the concept of human-centricity (Kostas) and the trust for AI decision-making (Aula et al.). IDIS researchers Johana Metsänheimo and Lise Moawad also participated in the workshop.
IDIS and BRIDPOL teams have also grown with a new Research Assistant Eero Lipponen. He will be assisting our researchers for example with data collection, coding and literature reviews.
IDIS on the road
IDIS researchers have also been actively participating in political science event domestically and abroad. Four IDIS affiliated researchers presented their work at the Finnish Political Science Association’s Annual Conference at the University of Lapland in April. Juho Mölsä co-chaired and presented a paper on the (de)regulatory processes around automated decision-making at the Policy process workshop. Joel Hänninen co-chaired and presented a paper inquiring the political economy of Big Tech at the Political Economy workshop. Lise Moawad co-chaired and presented a paper on the topic of representative democracy and social sciences at the Parliaments as political microcosmos workshop. Laura Nordström presented a paper on the Big Tech lobbying at the EU level at the EU research workshop.
Spring has also been an active season for international mobility. Tero Erkkilä participated in the Law and Society Association’s Annual Conference in May where he presented co-authored (with Juho Mölsä) paper on the Ombudsmen and Venice Principles. Also, Joel Hänninen attended “Historical Materialism 2025: Organizing in the Capitalocene” in Athens, Greece. His presentation was titled “Technology and the Master’s House – AI and critical theory of technology”. Moreover, Laura Nordström was a visiting researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center between the 16th May and 17th June, where she was hosted by the Politics of Digitalization program. The visit also facilitated the collection of interview material on the topic of EU-level lobbying in Germany for the SEE TECH project, funded by the Research Council of Finland. Ville Aula’s doctoral dissertation was accepted by the LSE and Ville has joined the Oxford University's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies as a postdoctoral researcher.
Publications
A new book Public Policies for Hybrid Governance was published in May and it has been co-edited by our Tero Erkkilä together with Jarmo Vakkuri, Jan-Erik Johansson and Romulo Pienhero. The editors also co-authored chapters developing the theoretical and conceptual frameworks around hybridity in governance, institutions and policies. The book also includes a chapter titled Hybridity and non-human agency in digital governance: a case of human-centricity that is authored by IDIS researchers Tero Erkkilä and Konstantinos Kostas.