AI and democracy: Emmy Noether grant for LMU political scientist

Why do many people profess their commitment to democracy, yet vote for politicians who undermine it? This is the type of question that political scientist Alexander Wuttke, who has been awarded funding by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Emmy Noether Programme, likes to address. The grant amounts to €1.17 million for a period of six years.

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Alexander Wuttke is Junior Professor of Digitalization and Political Behavior at LMU’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science. His teaching and research exploresthe promises and challenges of liberal democracy from the perspective of citizens. To this end, he makes particular use of experimental and computer-assisted methods of social research. In his project “Predictably Paradoxical: Leveraging AI to Map the Democratic Mind,” Wuttke is employing a novel AI-supported interview method to investigate how contradictory democratic attitudes arise.

“Our data shows that citizens of established democracies are often no more satisfied with the political system than people in authoritarian states,” says Wuttke. “Many do not even perceive their country as more democratic than people in autocracies view theirs. And even when citizens clearly profess their commitment to democracy, they act contrariwise at the ballot box.” The political scientist argues that the prevailing research practice of using standardized, closed surveys prevents these contradictions in democratic orientations from being elucidated. “Methods have tended to measure whether people support democracy, but they scarcely capture what people think about democracy and how well-founded and stable their democratic convictions are.”

AI interviews that resemble human ones

In his new project, Wuttke will map “democratic belief systems” comparatively. He is interested not only in whether people fundamentally support democracy, but also in how consistent and robust this attitude is.

To do this, Wuttke is working with an interdisciplinary team from the fields of computer science, political psychology, and computer-assisted social sciences to develop innovative, AI-supported interviews. He is training language models to conduct open or semi-structured conversations, similar to human interviewers. In addition, he is using traditional methods, including standardized, closed questions and panel data with repeated interviews.

Extensive data will be collected in around 13 democracies and selected authoritarian states, with approximately 1,000 respondents per country. The aim is to combine the depth of content of qualitative interviews with the reach of large-scale surveys. In this way, Wuttke wants to show, among other things, under what conditions people recognize violations of democratic principles or allow themselves to be deceived by seemingly pro-democratic authoritarian rhetoric.