About me
I'm Professor of Data Science and Public Policy at the Hertie School in Berlin and Director of the Data Science Lab. My research focuses on political communication, attitude formation in the digital age, and the use of online data in social research. I use experimental methods, online data, and innovative measurement strategies to study how people act and think, politically. Please find my CV here.
- +49 (0)30 259 219 450
- munzert@hertie-school.org
- @simonsaysnothin.bsky.social
- github.com/simonmunzert
- Google Scholar
- ORCID
Current research
- Myside bias and public preferences for online content moderation (with Lisa Oswald, Julia Ellingwood, and Richard Traunmüller, funded by Facebook Research)
- Zweitstimme — forecasting German federal elections (with Thomas Gschwend and Lukas Stoetzer, funded by the DFG)
- The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change (Working Group 5: public and political engagement)
- Media Exposure and Opinion Formation in an Age of Information Overload (with Pablo Barberá, Andrew Guess, and JungHwan Yang, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation)
Foto: Hertie School | Maurice Weiß
Publications
See here for an overview of my research and publications, or browse my profile on Google Scholar.
Recent publications
Cornelius Erfort et al. "How swing model assumptions shape vote-to-seat predictions." Electoral Studies.
Lisa Oswald and Simon Munzert. "Little change in a changing landscape: Tracking exposure to untrustworthy news in Germany from 2017 to 2024." Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.
Cornelius Erfort et al. "The Zweitstimme Forecast for the German Federal Election 2025." PS: Political Science & Politics.
Teaching
I regularly teach graduate students about causal inference, online data collection, and computational social science in general. You can find my courses and syllabi here.
Automated Data Collection with R
Together with Christian Rubba, Peter Meißner, and Dominic Nyhuis, I've written Automated Data Collection with R — A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining. The book was published by John Wiley & Sons in 2015.
Thesis supervision
Thinking about a master's thesis? I supervise data-driven work on public opinion, political behavior, online communication, and content moderation. See my supervision page for topics I'm keen to advise and what a good fit looks like, and my policy on recommendation letters.
Other resources
Links to friends in academia and resources I recommend are listed here.