Luddy researcher wins fellowship to study AI-driven political misinformation
Alex Stewart, an associate professor of informatics at Indiana University's Luddy School, has been named an International Fellow at Sweden's Lund University Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies. The fellowship funds his research on how AI systems affect democratic institutions and political discourse.
Stewart will spend several months at Lund during the summers of 2026 and 2027 working on a project titled "Democratic challenges in an AI-mediated society." The fellowship brings together political scientists, economists, decision and control theorists, and mathematicians to develop mathematical models of how algorithmic platforms shape political behavior.
The research problem
Democracy is deteriorating in at least half the world's countries, with political polarization and AI-driven misinformation identified as critical global risks. Traditional political science theories don't adequately explain how algorithmic platforms reshape social interactions and democratic processes.
Stewart said the project addresses this gap by moving beyond single-discipline approaches. "The political discourse landscape is undergoing rapid transformation," he said. "It's increasingly mediated through algorithmic platforms that shape social interactions and democracy in ways that traditional political science theories struggle to explain."
Building a political climate model
The team aims to develop empirically grounded models comparable to environmental climate models. These models would help researchers identify risks posed by algorithmic interventions in public discourse.
The immediate focus is on AI chatbots and their effects on political polarization in online communities. Stewart brings expertise in computational and mathematical modeling to analyze human-AI interactions at scale.
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