Germain Gauthier
ifo/CESifo Visiting Researcher
Germain Gauthier, Bocconi University, CESifo Guest from 6 to 10 May 2024.
Social Media and the Dynamics of Protests
In this CESifo Working Paper (8326) Germain Gauthier and his collaborators have examined large protest movements that are now a combination of online and offline mobilizations. Many have noted that social media favors the emergence of protests by lowering coordination costs and making it easier to signal discontent. This study confirms that social media and online protests likely increase the number of street protesters at the start of a protest movement.
In his research, Mr. Gauthier develops and applies machine learning models to study topics at the intersection of political science and economics. He is particularly invested in natural language processing techniques (“text as data”) for social scientists. In his methodological work, he has proposed novel tools to mine political and economic narratives from large text corpora, as well as neural topic models for massive collections of documents with metadata.
In his applied work, Mr. Gauthier combines natural language processing techniques with (quasi-)experimental evidence to study a broad set of topics in political economy. Recently, he has written about the consequences of social media on political attitudes, social movements, and gender norms, and studied the impact of Large Language Models on gender stereotypes in the labor market. At CESifo, Mr. Gauthier will present these ongoing projects and discuss economists’ needs and expectations regarding machine learning techniques for Big Data.
Germain Gauthier is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at Bocconi University. He is affiliated with the IGIER and the DONDENA research centers, where he is an active member of the AXA Gender Lab, the CLEAN Unit, and the AI & Society Initiative. He was awarded a PhD in Economics in 2023 under the supervision of Alessandro Riboni at the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST, Paris). During his PhD studies, he visited the Center for Data Science and Economics (ETH, Zürich), sponsored by Elliott Ash.
