Projects

Whether people accept the state’s digital systems depends on how these systems are designed, not only on how politicians talk about them. With the EU Digital Identity Wallet as the case, we test in survey experiments in Germany and multiple other countries how control, transparency, reach into people’s lives, and the right to challenge decisions shape acceptance of these systems and trust in the state.

• Governance

How do people in Germany use AI chatbots to follow the news, what do systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok tell them, and what do people take away? We study how people use multiple AI systems for news and political information.

• The politics of AI

How do German parties use generative AI in their campaigns, what do people think of these uses, and how do parties learn what to do and what to avoid? Through interviews with practitioners and surveys, the project examines both how campaigns in various countries, such as the US, Germany, the UK, and Taiwan, use AI and how the public views it.

• The politics of AI

Thirteen partners in eight countries build AI tools that help governments run large public consultations online and test them in pilots, one of them on the City of Bamberg’s participation platform. My team leads the project’s review of research on AI and deliberation and surveys people in Germany on what they think of AI in public deliberation.

• The politics of AI

Russia is building AI systems under Kremlin control, and Western chatbots can pick up Kremlin narratives from their training data. My part asks how far Russian AI systems reach into democracies such as Germany and the United States and how these countries regulate them, and it produces a guide to AI-enabled propaganda for educators and journalists.

• The politics of AI