In my team, we aim to address substantive and policy-relevant questions related to the impact of digital technology on politics and democratic processes. This includes studying how digital communication and news platforms change individual political behavior but also how these changes then impact political communication and political processes. In our projects, we leverage experimental and observational data from digital media, automated text classification approaches using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches as well as surveys and survey experiments.
The two main research projects that I am currently involved in are both highly interdisciplinary with researchers hailing from different substantive fields. The first is a new project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation that aims to improve the quality of public discourse (Improving Public Discourse). This is joint work with colleagues at the Digital Democracy Lab, at ETH Zurich and at UCL and a continuation of prior work we did to support the work of the Public Discourse Foundation to counter online hate speech (StopHateSpeech).
Together with three colleagues at the University of Zurich, I further received DIZH infrastructure funding to establish DigiVox, a new national survey panel specifically dedicated to the study of the social, economic, cultural, political and policy implications of digital media and their interplay with technological developments in Switzerland. I am also a member of the executive board of the new Population Research Center at the University of Zurich.
You may find further details on ongoing and past research initiatives under Projects and please refer to Publications for a list of my academic publications. Together with colleagues I have further developed a number of Software packages that are available under open source licenses. Information related to newspaper, radio and TV coverage of my research may be found under Media Coverage.