Digitalization and Political Behavior
LMU Munich · Prof. Dr. Alexander Wuttke
Led by Prof. Dr. Alexander Wuttke, the teaching and research unit investigates the state of liberal democracy from the perspective of ordinary citizens and explores the challenges and opportunities afforded by digitalization. We strive for transparency, rigor, and inclusivity in our research culture. We use computational social science approaches and a broad array of survey-, field-, lab- and quasi-experimental methods for causal inference.
News
Open Positions
September 2026
Open Positions: 2 PhD Researchers and 1 Postdoc (Start 2027)
We are hiring! Our group at LMU Munich invites applications for three positions: two PhD positions and one postdoc. The research is about how ordinary citizens think about democracy and how their support for it can be strengthened. It brings together political psychology, experimental methods and computational social science.
Application deadline: October 20, 2026. We review applications on a rolling basis, so the earlier you apply, the better. Start: January 1, 2027 or as soon as possible.
The projects
The positions are part of two DFG-funded research projects.
Democratic Persuasion: How to Make the Case for Democracy (project proposal) Most citizens say they support democracy, but for many this support is wavering. This project identifies the motivations behind democratic skepticism and tests which communicative strategies can win these citizens back. We use survey experiments, LLM-based persuasive conversations, and a framed field experiment with one-on-one dialogues that we run together with civil society organizations.
Emmy Noether Research Group: Predictably Paradoxical: Mapping the Democratic Mind with AI People often hold puzzling and contradictory beliefs about democracy. Standardized surveys struggle to capture them, because their response options only measure what researchers already expect. Our group therefore uses large language models as interviewers. In AI Conversational Interviews, respondents in many countries explain in their own words what democracy means to them, while the AI interviewer asks follow-up questions. From these conversations we map democratic belief systems and distinguish well-founded from superficial democratic attitudes.
The positions
1. PhD Researcher working in both projects
75%, 4 years (extension possible), TV-L E13
You begin in Democratic Persuasion, where you help design and analyze persuasion experiments and develop your own interventions. You then continue in the Emmy Noether group. Your dissertation will be in the area of Computational Text Analysis for Mapping Democratic Belief Systems.
3. Postdoctoral Researcher on Democratic Persuasion
100%, fixed-term until October 31, 2028, TV-L E13
You lead the project’s framed field experiment on Socratic probing, a conversation technique that invites people to examine the reasons behind their own beliefs. Beyond this study, you develop your own theory-driven interventions to strengthen support for democracy and test them with LLM-based conversations or survey experiments.
Who we are looking for
Ideal candidates have training in quantitative methods, skills in R and/or Python, and an interest in political psychology, persuasion research or democracy research. Experience with LLMs and text-as-data methods is a plus. No candidate is expected to meet every criterion, and the job ads explain what matters most for each position.
What we offer
You will join a welcoming and collaborative team at one of Europe’s leading research universities. Our research combines scientific ambition with questions that matter for democratic societies, and we support your career development. Munich regularly ranks among the cities with the highest quality of life.
How to apply
Please send your application documents, a writing sample and a cover letter to A.Wuttke@lmu.de. The job ads describe what the cover letter should address for each position. Zoom interviews begin in October 2026.
We welcome applications from women and from other groups that are currently underrepresented in academia. Disabled applicants will be given preference if equally qualified.
New Pre-Print: AI Conversational Interviewing: Scaling Up Semi-Structured and In-depth Interviews
June 2026
Alexander Wuttke, Max Melchior Lang, Christopher Klamm, Quirin Würschinger, Frauke Kreuter
Public opinion research has long faced a trade-off between depth and scale: standardized surveys enable large-scale measurement but restrict respondents to researcher-defined categories, obscuring the diversity of unexpected considerations that underlie public sentiment. More conversational interviews provide richer insights through open-ended probing, but their reliance on trained human interviewers has kept them difficult to scale. This study introduces AI Conversational Interviewing as a method for collecting open-ended public opinion data at scale, pursuing three objectives: to demonstrate the analytical value of conversational text data for questions beyond the reach of closed-ended items; to assess the method’s practical viability through participants’ own evaluations; and to inform implementation by experimentally comparing voice-based, chat-based, and free-choice interview modes. We conducted a study combining an AI-led interview with a standardized survey on migration policy among 571 respondents recruited via Prolific and Payback Panel. The findings establish AI Conversational Interviewing as a viable and valuable addition to the social-science toolkit. The conversational transcripts surface considerations and reasoning that a comprehensive standardized battery does not capture such as markedly different mental models of migration among subgroups with similar attitudes levels. Among respondents who completed the interview, evaluations of the AI interview were at or above those of the standardized survey across modes, although completion itself varied by condition. By releasing open data and open-source pipeline materials, the study contributes to a growing literature on harnessing artificial intelligence to expand the methods of public opinion measurement.
New Project Acquired: BIDT DemocraGPT
February 2026
DemocraGPT develops an AI-based conversation training tool to help citizens engage in constructive democratic dialogue, even on controversial issues. The system simulates challenging conversation partners and trains users to respond empathically, manage defensiveness, and tolerate ambiguity. Tested through field experiments, it aims to bring people back into meaningful democratic exchange—online and offline.
New Project Aquired: Emmy Noether Funding
February 2026
Alexander Wuttke receives Emmy Noether funding
Why do people profess support for democracy yet vote for politicians who undermine it? Alexander Wuttke, Junior Professor of Digitalization and Political Behavior at LMU, is tackling this question with a €1.17 million Emmy Noether grant from the DFG. His project, Predictably Paradoxical: Leveraging AI to Map the Democratic Mind, uses AI-supported interviews to explore how contradictory democratic attitudes arise, combining large-scale surveys with in-depth, human-like conversations across 13 countries.
New Project Acquired: Democratic Persuasion
October 2025
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 Digitalization and Political Behavior (Prof. Dr. Alexander Wuttke).
The project addresses a key challenge of contemporary democracies: democratic backsliding increasingly occurs through elections and the decisions of ordinary citizens. It therefore examines how democratic support can be strengthened through effective communication.
Adopting a multidimensional view of democratic support, the project develops and tests theory-driven interventions tailored to different attitudinal profiles. These interventions are evaluated using large-scale survey experiments, in-depth online conversations, and in-person group discussions.
The project aims to generate practical insights into how pro-democratic communication can strengthen democratic resilience at the citizen level.
New Team Members
October 2025
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 case for democracy.