People
Team
AutoKnow is based at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. The core team will consist of the principal investigator, two postdoctoral fellows, and two PhD fellows, working with associated researchers and co-authors in Norway and abroad.
Core team
University of Oslo
Tore Wig
Principal Investigator · Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo
Tore Wig works on political regimes, political violence, and democratisation, combining historical analysis with quantitative and causal-inference methods. He has published widely on institutions in dictatorships, repression, the measurement of democracy and autocracy, and the role of universities in autocracies. He received the Fridtjof Nansen Award for young researchers in 2024 and the King's Gold Medal for the best PhD dissertation at the Faculty of Social Sciences in 2016.
Martin Søyland
Associated researcher · University of Stavanger
Computational social scientist working on text-as-data methods. Co-author on how autocracy shapes the social sciences and the political origins of critical social science.
Sirianne Dahlum
Associated researcher · University of Oslo
Political scientist working on autocracy, protest, and higher education. Co-author on Does academic output predict attacks on scientists?
Emil Aas Stoltenberg
Associated researcher · Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo
Statistician. Advises the project on statistical methodology and inference.
Ole Magnus Galaas Hansen
Research assistant · University of Oslo
Text analysis of semantic dimensions in scientific abstracts and their relationship to regime type.
Network
Co-authors and international collaborators
AutoKnow works with researchers at partner institutions on data, methods, and joint papers.
Jens Jungblut
Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo
Higher-education politics and policy. Co-author on social science production in autocracies.
Cathrine Holst
Professor of Philosophy of Science and Democracy, University of Oslo
Works on democracy, expertise, and the philosophy and sociology of science. Co-author of "The affinities between democracy and science", forthcoming in Inquiry.
Daniel A. N. Goldstein
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo
Works on social norms, informal institutions, and the survival of democratic institutions and state capacity, using game theory and survey experiments. Co-author on the regime model-alignment problem.
Frederik Hjorth
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), University of Copenhagen
Political psychology, public opinion, and data science methods. First author on the political origins of critical social science.
Eli Baltzersen
Doctoral Research Fellow, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo
Works on gender and politics and on the politics of law and moral attitudes. Co-author on the political origins of critical social science.
Felix Haass
Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics, Humboldt University of Berlin
Co-author on the East–West Germany comparison of social science under and after authoritarian rule.
Oguzhan Turkoglu
Trinity College Dublin
Co-author on academic output under democratic backsliding in Turkey.
Nils B. Weidmann
Professor of Political Science, University of Konstanz
Communication, Networks and Contention research group. Co-author on political constraints on scientific credibility.
Carl Henrik Knutsen
Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo · Research Professor, PRIO
Works on political regimes, democratisation, autocratic institutions, and economic development, and on the measurement of democracy and autocracy over the long run. Collaborator on AutoKnow.
Mitchell Bosley
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
First author on Agentic architecture for evaluating theories of politics.
Join us
Open positions
AutoKnow is recruiting two postdoctoral fellows and two PhD fellows at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. We are looking for researchers interested in political regimes, the politics of science and higher education, and computational social science, including text-as-data, large language models, and causal inference with observational data.
- Work with a large, original bibliometric and survey infrastructure
- Co-author papers within a well-funded, five-year research programme
- Join a strong community on political regimes and computational social science at Oslo
How to apply
Vacancies are announced through the University of Oslo's recruitment portal. Informal enquiries are welcome at any time.
Contact the PI