Stefan Müller

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. I am also the School Director of Research, Innovation and Impact, and the Programme Director of the BSc Computational Social Science and the MSc/GradDip Politics and Data Science. Previously, I was a Senior Researcher at the University of Zurich.

Research

My research focuses on political representation, party competition, political communication, public opinion, and quantitative text analysis. My work has been published in journals such as the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, the European Journal of Political Research, Political Science Research and Methods, and PLOS Biology, among others.

I lead two funded research projects. The first project assesses environmental and energy policies from a comparative perspective. The project is embedded into the all-island, multidisciplinary energy research programme NexSys. The second project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, employs quantitative text analysis to analyse grant peer review reports.

Teaching and Learning 

I teach modules and workshops on political representation, statistics, computational social science, and quantitative text analysis. I received one of the 2021-22 University Teaching Excellence Awards, the highest honour bestowed by UCD for teaching and learning. I was also awarded the 2022 Teaching and Learning Prize from the Political Studies Association of Ireland. 

Awards and Memberships

I was Highly Commended in the Irish Research Council Early Career Researcher of the Year Awards 2024 and received an honourable mention for the 2021 Rising Star Award from the European Consortium for Political Research, the leading scholarly society focused on the research and teaching of political science in Europe.

I am a core member of the Connected_Politics Lab, a fellow at the UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, a non-resident fellow at the Digital Democracy Lab at the University of Zurich, a member of the UCD Energy Institute, co-author of the quanteda R package for quantitative text analysis, and maintainer of the Irish Polling Indicator. I have been selected as a member of the Young Academy Ireland, launched at the initiative of the Royal Irish Academy.

Consulting

I provide consulting services through my affiliation with ConsultUCD, UCD’s Managed Consultancy Service, offering expertise in text analysis, large language models (LLMs), and data visualisation. My work spans academia, industry, and public engagement, with a focus on making complex analytical tools both accessible and effective.

Bespoke Workshops and Training: I design and deliver tailored workshops on applied data visualisation, text analysis, LLMs, and large-scale survey data analysis. These workshops cater to researchers, businesses, and public sector organisations looking to harness cutting-edge computational methods.

Implementation of Local LLMs: I support organisations in deploying local LLMs to analyse open-ended text responses and longer documents. In collaboration with Irish and Swiss survey companies, I have worked on AI-driven text analysis projects that ensure privacy compliance while delivering actionable insights.

Public Outreach

I contribute to national and international media on Irish and European politics, including RTÉ News, RTÉ Radio 1, BBC, the Guardian, Reuters, Newstalk FM, the Sunday Independent, The Journal.ie, the Irish Examiner, the Tagesschau, and Handelsblatt.

Website: https://muellerstefan.net
Research Group: https://text-and-policy.com