# Computational Social Science, the Evolution of Policy Design and Rule Making in Smart Societies
## 4 Computational Social Science and Policy Design: Making Smarter Public Choices  
The implications of the scenario so far described go beyond the scientific dimension. By increasing our ability to understand and predict social dynamics, computational social science is preparing the ground to innovative and more rooted in science approaches to policy design. Thanks to the capacity of bringing together in innovative ways theory and computation, data and laboratory experiments, computational social science offers policy makers and legislators a clearer idea of complex socio-economic processes and an opportunity to increase the effectiveness of public choices. CSS methodologies are particularly suited to the study of non-linear phenomena that are, at the same time, difficult to understand with conventional mathematical and statistical tools and also often poorly understood by traditional policy-making procedures. That is why, in recent years, the scientific community has paid a growing attention to the intersections between computational social sciences and policy modeling [2; 12; 19]. As evidence of this, we can cite some research projects that explore the potential impact of computational methodologies in policy-making and try to promote what the EU defines as _\"scientific evidence-based policy making\"_[49], drawing attention to the need for policy-makers to ground their decisions in science. _FuturlCT_[50] is a research project presented in response to the FP7 Flagship Call ICT aiming to bring together complexity science, social sciences and information technologies to support the understanding and the management of complex global issues spanning from epidemics to crime, ecological disasters and financial crises. Largely inspired by CSS research, the core of the project is represented by the _Living Earth Platform_, an advanced simulation, visualization and participation platform designed to support decision-making of policy-makers, business people and citizens. A similar issue, the understanding and the prediction of systemic risk and global financial instabilities is the main topic of _FOC - Forecasting Financial Crises_[51], a project financed by the Future Emerging Technologies OPEN Scheme aiming, on the one hand, to offer a theoretical framework to measure risks in global financial market and, on the other hand, to deliver an ICT collaborative platform for monitoring systemic fragility and the propagation of financial distress across markets around the world. Dealing with the economy is also _Eurace_[52], FP6 European research that involved researchers from various backgrounds to build an agent-based simulation model of the European economy. The research tackles the complexity generated by the interplay between different macroeconomic policies (fiscal and monetary strategies, R&D incentives, _etc._) pursuing objectives that unfold on both the scientific and the societal level. From the scientific point of view, the main goal was the development of multi-agent models reproducing the emergence of global features of the economic system from the complex pattern of interactions among heterogeneous individuals. From the social point of view, the goal was to support EU policy design capabilities by means of simulation enabling one to perform what-if analysis, optimizing the impact of regulatory decisions that will be quantitatively based on the European economy scenario. _Fulpol_ (FUture POLicy modelling) [53], finally, is an FP7 project that aimed to provide a new approach to politics building on major innovations like multichannel social computing, crowd sourcing and social simulation. The project developed a governance model to support the policy design and implementation lifecycle by a system combining two CSS techniques: information extraction and social simulations. The first was used to collect, analyze and interpret the opinions expressed online by citizens, in order to give governments a better understanding of their needs.