Dr Christian Arnold

School of Government
Associate Professor in Government and AI

Contact details

Christian Arnold's work lies at the intersection between social science, computer science and statistics. Over the past decades, digitalization has profoundly transformed the world, presenting both opportunities and challenges. The accumulation and analysis of data have the potential to improve lives but also pose significant threats to privacy and democratic governance.

For instance, open data initiatives can benefit the population but also challenge data privacy. Similarly, social media can organize political movements but may undermine democratic societies. It requires interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between the social sciences, computer science, and statistics, to manage such complexities and opportunities of a data-driven society.

Qualifications

2014 Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
2012 Ph.D. in Political Science, Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim
2007 Political Science & Economics, M.A., University of Mannheim

Biography

Before joining the University of Birmingham, he was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University and a Departmental Lecturer at Oxford University. He also worked as a Data Scientist in the industry. His PhD in Political Science is from the Graduate School of the University of Mannheim

Research

Christian is keen to explore the possibilities of neural networks for social science research. Current projects include

Multimodal data
Synthetic data
Large Language Model agents

Publications

2024 Arnold, Christian, Luka Biedebach, Andreas Küpfer and Marcel Neunhoeffer (forth- coming coming): “The Role of Hyperparameters in Machine Learning Models and How to Tune Them”, Political Science Research and Methods.

2023 Arnold, Christian, David Doyle and Nina Wiesehomeier (2023): “How Presidents Follow the Call of International Capital”, Journal of Politics in Latin America, 15(3), p.262- 286.

Arnold, Christian, Benjamin Engst and Thomas Gschwend (2023): “Scaling Court Decisions with Citation Networks” Journal of Law and Courts, 11(1), p.25-44.

2021 Warner, Zach, J. Andrew Harris, Michelle Brown and Christian Arnold (2021): “Hid- den in Plain Sight? Detecting Electoral Irregularities Using Statutory Results” Electoral Studies, 74.

2020 Arnold Christian and Marcel Neunhoeffer (2020): “Really Useful Data—A Framework to Evaluate the Quality of Differentially Private Data”, Workshop on Economics of Privacy and Data Labor, Thirty-seventh International Conference on Machine Learning.

2017 Arnold, Christian, David Doyle and Nina Wiesehomeier (2017): “Presidents, Policy Compromise and Legislative Success”, Journal of Politics, 79(2), p.380-395.

Arnold, Christian (2017): “Empty Promises and Non-Incorporation in Mercosur”, International Interactions, 43(4), p.643-667.

2013 Arnold, Christian and Berthold Rittberger (2013): “The Legalization of Dispute Resolution in Mercosur”, Journal of Politics in Latin America, 5(3), p.97-132