Dr Christian Arnold
I am an Associate Professor of Government and AI at the University of Birmingham, and an Associate Member of CardiffNLP, the Natural Language Processing group at Cardiff University.
My work helps societies take better decisions. I study how governments, political institutions, and citizens use and are affected by AI tools. Since politics relies on verbal and non-verbal communication, I often analyse text, speech, and visual material jointly. I also examine how systems like large language models influence politics and how they can be used responsibly in social science research.
My research has been published in leading international journals, including the Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Electoral Studies.
Research Interests
- Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Social Science
- Multimodal Analysis
- LLMs
Recent News
- September 2026 — Welcomed the third cohort of the MSc AI & Government and MSc AI & Sustainable Development at the University of Birmingham.
- August 2026 — The homepage of our DFG funded project VideoParl is now live, with Andreas Küpfer and Christian Stecker.
- July 2026 — Presenting “Far-Right Speeches and Emotional Contagion in Parliament” at PolMeth, Michigan State University, with Andreas Küpfer and Christian Stecker.
- July 2026 — Registered a preanalysis plan on OSF for an eye-tracking study on image depth and object prominence in political communication, with Andreas Küpfer — requested by a reviewer ahead of the next round of revisions.
- June 2026 — “Reaching for the Threshold” published in Journal of Conflict Resolution, 70(6), pp. 1018–1043, with Carsten Schulz.
- June 2026 — I had three papers at the European Political Science Society (EPSS) conference, Belfast: “Far-Right Speeches and Emotional Contagion in Parliament: Sequential and Multimodal Evidence from Germany” with Andreas Küpfer and Christian Stecker; “Measuring Media Slant Through Image Analysis” with Andreas Küpfer, Oliver Rittmann, and Michelle Torres; and “Designing, Documenting, and Reusing Qualitative Data in the Age of AI: An Integrative Framework” with Florian G. Kern.
- June 2026 — Panellist at the BISA roundtable “The Challenges and Opportunities of AI in Research,” Brighton.
- May 2026 - Find our paper “Reaching for the Threshold: How Minimum Participation Rules Facilitate Multilateral Treaty Ratification” in the current version of Journal of Conflict Resolution
- May 2026 — “Causal Effects of Trigger Words in Social Media Discussions” presented at ACM WebSci ‘26, Braunschweig.
- May 2026 — I was at the University of Western Ontario. Beyond designing our experiment on political debates between LLMs and Humans, I gave a talk titled “The Politics the Camera Reveals”. It covered a range of projects on visual politics I am currently working on.
- “Causal Effects of Trigger Words in Social Media Discussions” presented at ACM WebSci ‘26, Braunschweig.
- April 2026 - COMPTEXT is coming to Birmingham! Go and tell your friends. #sciencerocks
- January 2026 - New courses: “AI and Global Challenges” and “AI for Government and Policy” at University of Birmingham