Research Interests and Areas

The professorship's research addresses the question of how the institutions and processes of democratic political systems change through digital technologies, how power relations change, and how digital technologies can be regulated in the interests of democratic resilience. The empirical studies analyze the use of AI in policing, law enforcement, social policy, election campaigns, and public health. The regional focus is on Germany and other European countries, the USA, and Latin American countries. The perspective is always twofold: On the one hand, the works analyze how digital technologies shape political systems - and on the other hand, how they can be shaped through regulation. The research is comparative with regard to countries, technologies, regulatory approaches, and models of democracy. A key finding of the research is that the widespread assumption that democratic societies are unwilling or too complex to regulate digital technologies is not true. On the contrary, one can observe a large number of initiatives to actively shape digital technologies and platforms. Digital technologies not only challenge democratic structures and procedures, but also revitalize them.

Important Publications

Ulbricht, Lena; Yeung, Karen (2022): Special Issue „Algorithmic Regulation“. In: Regulation & Governance, 16 (1), 1-354.

Schwarting, Rena; Ulbricht, Lena (2022): Why organization matters in „algorithmic discrimination”. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Special Issue „Internet, Big Data und digitale Plattformen“, (Ed.) Ulrich Dolata und Jan-Felix Schrape, 1-24. DOI: 10.1007/s11577-022-00838-3

Ulbricht, Lena (2020): Politisierung und Algorithmen. In: Leviathan, Special Issue „Die demokratische Gesellschaft des 21. Jahrhunderts im Spannungsfeld zwischen Entpolitisierung und Re-Politisierung”, (Ed.) Andreas Schäfer und David Meiering, 253-278. DOI: 10.5771/9783748904076-253

Eyert, Florian; Irgmaier, Florian; Ulbricht, Lena (2020): Extending the framework of algorithmic regulation. The Uber case. In: Regulation and Governance, Special Issue „Algorithmic Regulation”, Guest editors Lena Ulbricht und Karen Yeung, 1-22. DOI: 10.1111/rego.12371

Ulbricht, Lena (2020): Scraping the Demos. Digitalization, Web Scraping and the Democratic Project. In: Democratization, Special Issue „Democratization beyond the Post-Democratic Turn. Political Participation between Empowerment and Abuse”, Guest editors Ingolfur Blühdorn und Felix Butzlaff, 426-442. DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2020.1714595