News

News from the Professorship of Digitalization and Political Behavior at LMU Munich: publications, projects, media appearances, and team updates.

Published at AJPS: Is Support for authoritarian rule contagious? Evidence from field and survey experiments

publication

Sirianne Dahlum, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, Alexander Wuttke

New Pre-Print: AI Conversational Interviewing: Scaling Up Semi-Structured and In-depth Interviews

media

Alexander Wuttke, Max Melchior Lang, Christopher Klamm, Quirin Würschinger, Frauke Kreuter

New Project Acquired: BIDT DemocraGPT

project

DemocraGPT develops an AI-based conversation training tool to help citizens engage in constructive democratic dialogue, even on controversial issues. The system simulates…

New Project Aquired: Emmy Noether Funding

project

Alexander Wuttke receives Emmy Noether funding

New Project Acquired: Democratic Persuasion

project

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved funding for the three-year project “How to Make the Case for Democracy” at the Teaching and Research Unit for…

New Team Members

team

Welcome Josefina Sommer and Philipp Mendoza to the Democratic Persuasion Team! They’ve joined the DFG Project “Democratic Persuasion” to experimentally test how to make the…

New Scientist reports on AI study

media

Title: “How government use of AI could hurt democracy”

New Interview on Open Science: “A preregistration plan is a plan, not a prison”

media

In a recent interview with ZBW, Alexander Wuttke discusses the importance of preregistration and Registered Reports in enhancing transparency and credibility in scientific…

New Study: Replication of “Why voters who value democracy participate in democratic backsliding” in Germany’s multi-party context

publication

This report documents our replication of Braley et al.’s (2023) study, which examined whether voters become less willing to subvert democratic norms upon learning that their…

Pre-Print: Observing many students using difference-in-differences designs on the same data and hypothesis reveals a universe of uncertainty

media

We have fundamentally revised the manuscript of a study that reports on a many-analysts project that we conducted in courses on research design at LMU Munich with our LMU…

DFG Project Funded: Democratic Persuasion - How to Make The Case for Democracy

project

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved funding for our new research project “How to Make the Case for Democracy.” The project will run for three years and…

New Computational Social Science Master’s program at LMU

teaching

We are excited to announce the launch of the new M.A. in Computational Social Science at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. This interdisciplinary program combines…

AI Conversational Interviewing: Transforming Surveys with LLMs as Adaptive Interviewers

media

This is our first computer science conference publication. Accepted at LaTeCH-CLfL 2025. A little bit proud of this truly interdisciplinary research project with a great…

The reliability of replications: a study in computational reproductions

publication

A few years ago, we embarked on the Many-Analyst project—originally envisioned as a small side project for a conference we organized. However, it quickly grew into a…

Slides on Digital Democracy

teaching

I recently gave several talks and lectures on digital democracy, its promises and problems. I discuss fake news, filter bubbles, liquid democracy, and people’s support for…

Pre-Print on AI Conversational Interviewing

media

AI Conversational Interviewing: Transforming Surveys with LLMs as Adaptive Interviewers

DLF Interview: Citizens’ Assemblies

media

I was interviewed for “Systemfragen” on the promises and problems of citizen assemblies.

New Publication: A Very Short Summary of What We Know about Populist Attitudes

publication

Written with Anne Schulz, we have published an entry in the new Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication.

BR24 Mitreden: Extreme im Aufwind - Was müssen die anderen Parteien besser machen?

media

I participated in a live TV broadcast along with Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann and Marina Weißband on the state of democracy.

New publication: Making the case for democracy: A field-experiment on democratic persuasion

publication

This study with my friend Florian Foos was special. During the COVID pandemic we held townhalls on COVID politics with citizens and politicians and we participated in all of…

New team members

media

Dr. Nadine Zwiener-Collins has joined the team as a Postdoctoral researcher. She studies public opinion and political behavior. Next to teaching at GSI, she contributes to…

DLF-Interview on Survey Methodology

media

Can we trust surveys? Are representative polls possible?

SZ-Interview on Democracy

media

German Newspaper Süddeutsche (Katharina Haase) talked with me about democracy and the ongoing protest against the Alternative für Deutschland.

Opinion piece in “Forschung&Lehre” (german)

media

Forschung & Lehre published a collection of opinion pieces on “Teaching Today” where I shared my thoughts on artificial intelligence in teaching.

FAZ newspaper covers study on populist attitudes

media

Boris Holzer published a summary of our Registered Report study (Nils Steiner, Christian Schimpf, Alexander Wuttke) in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, titled “Der Aufstand…

Open Postdoc Teaching position (50%, 1 Year) [position filled]

team

There is an open position for a Postdoc at our Teaching Unit for Digitalization and Political Behavior. The position is part-time, starting April 1st for two semesters. It…

Slides on AI in teaching

publication

I published some slides (German)

AI Symposium

teaching

The state of Bavaria established a large number of AI professorships in the past years. Today, 10 newly appointed LMU AI and Data Science professors presented their research.

R Web course

project

New Resource to Learn R for Social Science the gentle, fun, and accessible way - no hassle to install R(Studio). Dive right in - individualized feedback - code on your own…