The main focus of the research group is on the study of digital democracy, i.e., the implications of digital technology for politics and democratic processes. More specifically, we are interested in how digital communication and news platforms together with new ways of digital participation change individual political behavior. In addition, we investigate how these changes then impact political communication and political processes. And, lastly, we try to tackle specific policy problems related to the digital transformation where our research can provide evidence-driven recommendations to civil society and political stakeholders.

In our projects, we leverage experimental and observational data from digital media, automated text classification using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches as well as surveys and survey experiments. Together with colleagues, we have also developed and currently maintain a number of software packages for data analysis and visualization that are available as open source tools to the research community. The group is part of the Digital Society Initiative (DSI) at the University of Zurich.