Projects | Lennart Schürmann

Contesting AI Infrastructure

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The expansion of artificial intelligence depends on physical infrastructure. Data centres need land, water and large amounts of energy, and their siting is decided by municipalities, provinces and permitting authorities. Across Europe, residents and civil society organisations have started to push back.

This project studies that contestation across three arenas. In the street, citizens organise protests and local campaigns. In representative institutions, they lobby municipal councils and parliaments. In courts and administration, they file objections, submit public comments and challenge permits.

I ask three questions. When do opponents choose one arena over another? How do permitting authorities and courts respond? And how do citizens judge the legitimacy of each route?

Opposition frames vary. Some campaigns focus on resources such as water, energy and land. Others reject AI expansion as a whole. A third set of claims asks who benefits, contrasting foreign operators with local and national interests.

Current work

A pilot study in the Netherlands traces how opposition to data centres moves between protest, local politics and legal procedures.

A survey experiment, funded by the European University Institute, examines how citizens in Germany evaluate actors who oppose data centres in different arenas. It is also part of my project Empowering Voices Beyond Ballots?

Empowering Voices Beyond Ballots?

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Many diagnose that representative democracy is in a state of crisis, with an increasing alienation between citizens and elected representatives. In this crisis of representation, other political actors, such as protest activists, enter the stage and increasingly claim to represent either parts of the electorate or subjects without formal representation. One example are the environmentalist activists from the Last Generation who declared to speak on behalf of both the entire humanity and nature. Another example is the xenophobic movement PEGIDA, who publicly stated they speak for the entire ’German people.’ Such actors have no official electoral mandate and selfauthorize their representative claims. Voices-Beyond-Ballots will extend established theories of political representation and employ innovative empirical approaches to (1) identify the circumstances under which these self- authorized political actors use such representative claims, (2) elucidate how self-authorized and elected actors use representative claims differently, (3) and analyze the factors influencing citizens’ receptivity to these claims.

I expect non-elected actors to increasingly use representative claims, particularly to speak for those who have no other voice in politics. Furthermore, I expect that people do actually accept such claims from non-elected actors, yet more if they refer to people (e.g. future generations) or subjects (e.g. nature) that have no formal representation in politics. At the same time, such claims-making might also undermine people’s beliefs in representative claims by elected officials. Whether this development is good or bad news for representative democracy, as we know, remains thus an open question that Voices-Beyond-Ballots will further illuminate.

To fully understand these dynamics, we currently lack systematic and rich data on representative claims by non- elected political actors. Therefore a key ambition of Voices-Beyond-Ballots is to provide unique data of representative claims by protest activists based on video-enhanced protest event data from German protests from the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008 until 2023. This dataset combines classical protest event analysis with video and text data of the speeches made at protest events. In a second step Voices-Beyond-Ballots analyzes the citizens’ receptivity to these claims. To measure them, Voices-Beyond-Ballots will use survey experiments in which citizens are presented with varying representative claims by non-elected and elected actors to measure how citizens perceive these claims. All collected data will be made publicly available.

Overall, Voices-Beyond-Ballots offers ground-breaking combinations of the supply side (what protest actors say) and the demand side (how citizens receive) of representative claims by non-elected actors, and thus builds bridges between political representation, social movement and communication research. By surpassing the traditional politician-citizen paradigm, the project’s outcomes promise to enhance our comprehension of non-electoral representation in democracies.

In a current survey experiment, funded by the European University Institute, I test when citizens accept representative claims by actors who oppose AI data centres in the street, in courts and in parliament.

Voices-Beyond-Ballots is funded through the WZB Harvard Merit Fellowship 2025/26 and a DAAD PRIME Grant. The research project will run from January 2025 until June 2027 and will be conducted at Harvard University, the European University Institute, the Free University of Berlin, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Political Protest and Radicalization

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Since the 1990s, the protest scene in Germany has been shaped by issues such as migration, the environment and welfare. These issues have often led to violent mobilisations and counter-mobilisations on the streets. The aim of the WZB ProtestMonitoring is to monitor the German protest landscape in a systematic way. On an ongoing basis, we analyse the temporal and spatial contexts of protest events, the discursive opportunity structures of protest, as well as the radicalisation processes of individual protest actors.

Methodologically, our project is based on a comprehensive data collection, which comprises three closely related collection instruments: First, we systematically analyse protest events since the 1950s (including form of protest, place, time, number of participants and issues). This is retrospectively linked to the Prodat dataset. Second, we examine public debates in the context of protest events and political violence, as well as long-term dynamics of radicalisation in the public sphere. Third, we analyse the profiles of radical protest actors and their socio-structural characteristics. Empirically, the project combines automated and manual methods of quantitative content analysis based on media coverage in national and regional newspapers as well as biographical and social network data.

The project is part of the top research cluster Monitoring System and Transfer Platform Radicalization (MOTRA), a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Federal Ministry of the Interior in the context of civil security research. At the WZB, the Centre for Civil Society Research and the Department of Migration, Integration, Transnationalisation are involved.

External Link to the project website

Political Representation and Protest Politics in European Democracies

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Looking at the newspapers in recent years, one topic seemed to be omnipresent - political protest. Street mobilization constitutes an integral part of political participation in representative democracies nowadays. Yet, to what extent can protests influence politics in representative democracies? And which political actors represent the interests of these protests?

My dissertation explores these questions by examining protests and their representation in European democracies in an empirical-analytical way. My dissertation topic is thus situated at the intersection of social movement and representative democracy literature. It consists of four interrelated individual projects that make theoretical contributions and methodological innovations in the research area of the political representation of protest.

The main focus of my dissertation lies in the interaction between civil society actors (with a particular focus on protest movements) and political actors of the representative-electoral systems (with a specific emphasis on parties and MPs). Historically, political representation is geographically bound as representatives are elected in territorial districts with the right to vote defined by geographical borders. In European democracies, this centuries ago established system is still in place nowadays, albeit in certain varieties with several adjustments. Even in more flexible electoral systems, the geographic borders of the districts define who can vote and who is excluded from voting rights. Political representation is therefore per definition restricted to territorial communities and thus defined by borders. However, civil society increasingly organizes transnationally in the European context, thus transcending national and administrative borders.

To answer the research questions of my dissertation project, I use a mixed-method approach combining well-established techniques such as regression analyses and semi-structured interviews with cutting-edge machine-learning methods such as synthetic controls and topic modeling to process big data. A particular focus of my dissertation lies in the analysis of political texts. One data source I use is online political communication on social media, offering the opportunity to access politicians’ political communication at the individual level in an unmediated channel. Arguably, MPs’ most relevant public communicative action occurs in parliamentary debates, which is why I also analyze political communication in parliaments. The methodological triangulation in my mixed-method approach allows me to take advantage of the benefits of processing large amounts of data while still obtaining theoretically-driven valid results.

My results indicate that individual politicians and political parties are more responsive to protest events within the borders of their electoral districts. Comparing different levels of the European multilevel system, I can show that the protest location is most influential for legislators on subnational levels. Beyond that, my findings underline the importance of politicians’ biographies, which are, besides party ideological and strategic consideration, crucial to explain their responsiveness to political protests.

I received funding for this project from the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences (CGS) at the University of Cologne, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service), and the Schmittmann-Wahlen Foundation. Furthermore, parts of this research are funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2126/1– 390838866.