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Jan Zilinsky

Postdoctoral Fellow

TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology

Research Associate

Center for Social Media and Politics (NYU)

Does technology disrupt democratic politics or does it merely render intolerance, inequalities and government incompetence visible?

I am a computational social scientist and I study the effects of technology on politics and society.

A teacher with a group of student

Photo: Last day of teaching a seminar on behavioral economics and political campaigns

Contact: jan.zilinsky@tum.de

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar

About Me

Research

I develop methods and instruments for measuring what I consider to be important aspects of contemporary politics: economic populism, grievances, anti-tech sentiment, ideological arguments, and conspiracy theorizing. My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Nature Communications, Political Analysis, Political Behavior, Political Communication, and other peer-reviewed journals.

Technology & Politics
 

Public opinion and political behavior: Are (especially young) citizens disillusioned with democracy? What are economic identities? What is the relative importance of identities, policy issues, and partisanship when people vote? Do heavy users of social media believe more conspiracy theories?

Methods: To what extent is economic sentiment influenced by motivated reasoning? With James Bisbee, we identified several considerations for measuring the component of (subjective) economic evaluations which is driven by objective economic conditions.

Reseach

Papers

Teaching

A group of students with their lecturer in an outside atrium

Background

I was born in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1980s: the surveillance state was weakening, but travel restrictions in the one-party dictatorship were still in place. People needed an exit visa when they wished to leave the country, and they had to promise to return (because you were naturally an enemy or a saboteur if you were "not happy" in the communist paradise). By 1989 the defunct ideology, which was partly imposed but also partly home-grown, was finally discredited. The Velvet Divorce followed four years later, so the country listed on my birth certificate no longer exists. For me, witnessing Slovakia’s necessary transformation — but also the fragility of democracy and economic reforms in the face of bad ideas — was an experience more formative than the formal education I would receive. It’s because of those experiences that I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a post-communist society. But the flip side of the timing of the fall of the Iron Curtain, which was lucky for me, is that my older family members were less fortunate. When my grandfather renounced his Communist Party membership in the 1960s (the occupying Soviet Army had just killed his sister), my mother was nearly barred from studying at a university. So, I come from a line of people who had to look over their shoulders and lower their voices whenever politics came up. Your friends could be regime informants, you never really knew for sure. (I like the story of how Stasi agents tried to recruit and corrupt the young Angela Merkel. She had a clever response for the officers: she insisted she was unable to keep secrets; see p. 29 in Kati Morton’s The Chancellor.) Crossing borders Without telling anyone at home, I applied to study at a bilingual French lycée as a teenager, spent a few years there and then — with the soft power of anglophone countries clearly working on me — applied to British and American universities. I moved to Harvard, where I watched Bush fumble his response to the global financial crisis and continued to be fascinated by how much economic outcomes depend on politics. A few days after graduating, Daron Acemoglu, David Laibson, and John List hired me as a research assistant. While waiting for my visa, I hung my hat at a central bank. Then a real stroke of good fortune found me when I was hired by the think-tank which you may know as the birthplace of the Washington Consensus. (But did you know it also published Dani Rodrik’s thoughtful pushback, Has Globalization Gone Too Far?) I found D.C. to be a place where introverts get a shot, learned from people who truly cared about policy, but then one fabulist had hacked the information ecosystem to gain unlimited free media and insulted his way to the White House. I bought some storage space to store my things in Washington, and went to NYU to try to do some systematic research about how digital technology affects the way politics gets done. With the help of advisers and colleagues, I wrote papers about echo chambers, Russian trolls, and other topics, received a PhD, and moved to post-Merkel Germany to work at the Technical University of Munich. Despite countless problems with the existing information environment, I have to reject nihilism. (Eastern Europe did survive four decades of nasty propaganda, remember?) I just don’t believe we now live in a post-truth era. Humans have the intellectual software to handle the digital age, and I hope that my forthcoming work will show you that there is a better way to think about the problems of contemporary politics.

Selected (non-peer-reviewed) articles

Recent talks

Miami, Zurich, Florence, Abu Dhabi & Munich

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photos of three public talks
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