David Karpa is an applied economist specializing in the political economy of digital and automated governance. He studies how political and economic institutions interact with technological change, focusing on artificial intelligence and automation. His research examines algorithmic governance, particularly how such systems are interpreted by citizens. Using mixed empirical methods, he analyzes attitudes, cognition, and behavior at the micro level. His work on public support for surveillance has been published in Comparative Political Studies.

He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University of Munich, where he works in the ERC-funded project Algorithmic Governance – A Public Perspective (AGAPP). In 2025, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Social Data Science (CSDS), University of Helsinki. In 2024, he served as an adjunct professor at KIMEP University, and completed his doctorate at the University of Bremen. In 2023, he was a visiting researcher at the Department of Economics, Nazarbayev University.