K. Jonathan Klüser

Political Scientist

K. Jonathan Klüser
I study how political institutions, media, and digital platforms allocate attention — which problems get taken up, who has the power to force an issue onto the agenda, and what happens to democratic representation when that power shifts outside elected institutions. My research spans three connected strands: executive institutions and bureaucratic capacity, representation and economic inequality in party systems, and the digital reallocation of attention through influencers, platform governance, and deepfakes. I hold a PhD in Political Science from Aarhus University and currently lead an SNSF Ambizione project at the University of Zurich.
View CV
What I work on

No parliament, ministry, or party can process more than a fraction of the demands a society produces. Every institution runs rules, formal and informal, that decide which problems get seen and which get ignored. I study those rules: which issues governments, coalitions, and parties take up, who has the standing to force a problem onto their agendas, and what it means for representation that this power is increasingly exercised from outside those institutions.

That question runs through three lines of work. In the executive, I look at how bureaucratic structures shape what governments can attend to and translate into law. In party systems, I ask why four decades of rising economic inequality have produced so little political response, work that is becoming the book Lost in Transmission (Cambridge University Press, with Alexander Horn and Leo Ahrens). On digital platforms, I follow the migration of attention to actors with no formal role in democratic politics: influencers, recommendation systems, content moderation regimes, and now AI-generated media.

Methodologically I mostly work with text-as-data and multimodal classification, survey and online experiments, and time-series cross-section data.