Political Economy of Media and AI

The research group Political Economy of Media and AI studies how news media, social media and their recommender algorithms, and artificial intelligence systems such as large language models relate to politics and the economy.

To this end, the group combines political economy with data science, using field and survey experiments as well as large-scale observational data.

A second focus is method development for the social sciences. Much of what matters politically and economically is recorded as text, images, audio, and video rather than as numbers. The group builds econometric and machine-learning tools that make such material amenable to statistical inference, for example to recover the narratives running through a corpus of news or to quantify the ideological position taken by a political advertisement.

Prof. Dr Philine Widmer Associate Professor