About the Center

Democratic societies are under increasing pressure. Mis- and disinformation, political polarization, declining institutional trust, extremist narratives, and the rapid spread of generative AI systems all create conditions where public debate becomes harder to navigate and easier to manipulate. These challenges are not theoretical—they shape elections, public policy, and citizens’ everyday decisions. Norway is not exempt.

The Center for Democracy & Information Integrity (CDI) exists to meet this need. It brings together researchers from psychology, political science, communication, economics, data science, law, and organizational behavior with a shared focus on understanding and strengthening democratic resilience. By coordinating expertise across several BI departments, CDI creates the kind of interdisciplinary environment these problems require but rarely receive.

As information becomes easier to manipulate and harder to verify, the need for systematic, research-driven responses grows—nationally and internationally. BI Norwegian Business School hosts leading experts on misinformation, political extremism, trust, collective threat, opinion formation, digital influence, and institutional legitimacy. Bringing these scholars into a single center opens up work that individual labs cannot achieve alone: larger-scale projects, integrated perspectives across fields, and research infrastructure that spans experiments, large datasets, and computational methods.

CDI’s work moves along three tracks:

Understanding. Deepening empirical insight into how people process political information and form beliefs in complex media environments—why they accept or reject information, how polarization develops, and what increases susceptibility to misperceptions and extremist narratives.

Consequences. Connecting these micro-level psychological processes to macro-level outcomes: how democratic institutions withstand—or fail to withstand—organized influence campaigns, extremist mobilization, and rapid technological change.

Application. Translating findings into robust interventions and practical tools—communication strategies that improve accuracy, educational approaches that build critical evaluation, computational systems that detect coordinated manipulation, and policy guidance that supports institutional stability.

Beyond academic output, CDI translates knowledge into practical tools for policymakers, civil-society organizations, educators, media professionals, private-sector actors, and the public. This happens through targeted policy briefings and roundtables, executive education modules, public-facing interventions, an annual State of Democracy and Information Report, and collaboration with public agencies, civil-society organizations, and international research institutions.

CDI was officially formed in January 2026 and is co-directed by Anton Gollwitzer (Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior) and Jonas R. Kunst (Department of Communication and Culture). Its members are drawn from across five BI departments, and the center operates as an umbrella: each member runs their own independent research stream, while the center enables integrated projects, shared data collection, and coordinated intervention work across them.