Democracy and Digital Media

Digital media has changed the way public spheres function around the world, specifically in the information environment of the internet. Moving from mostly one-to-many communication to a many-to-many system has increased its complexity. In addition, big platforms are curating information flows algorithmically and optimize them for engagement. Our goal is to better understand how those transitions are affecting democracies globally and political behaviour in particular.

Phenomena such as affective polarization, the rise of populism, the spread of misinformation and diminishing trust in institutions are potential developments of concern. For us, tools from data science, but also causal inference and experimentation, are essential to achieve this goal of empirically describing the complex mechanisms at play between human behavior, technology and politics.

The central research questions are: How is public discourse shaped by social networks and sorting algorithms, and how does it benefit certain rhetoric? How do generated images affect attention and emotions and how do they reinforce certain narratives more than others? Establishing causality between these factors in such complex socio-technical systems is an overarching challenge that we aim to address. To achieve this, we are convinced that looking at those systems from various angles is crucial. While the overarching questions span the whole research groups, we are composed of a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and methods. Digitalization is not only impacting social systems, but also expanding the methods for studying them and enabling us to cover a spectrum of measurements of human behavior between micro and macro levels, ranging from online experiments to field studies in social media and large-scale platform data analysis, while computer simulations may help connect the scales.