Projects | Lisa Garbe | Personal Website | Research & Publications

Digitalization & Legibility

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Governments worldwide increasingly use digitalization, often in an attempt to make government structures more efficient and facilitate citizens’ access to state services. In this research project, I study the implications of digital IDs for state-citizen relations.

Together with researchers at the WZB, Vanderbilt University, and MIT, we conducted a survey experiment to analyze the effect of different policies governing biometric identification on citizens’ willingness to register for such a program across different ethnic groups in Kenya.

Together with researchers at WZB, we examine citizen attitudes toward the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) through a survey experiment similar to the one conducted in Kenya, with data collection scheduled for March 2026.

Elite Networks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This project explores how elite networks shape politics and affect political inequality. Joint work with researchers at the University of St.Gallen and the University of Frankfurt examines the networks between foreign-authoritarian shareholders of internet-providing companies and their role in tightening control over local internet provision using data from the TOSCO project.

More recent work together with researchers at WZB explores the role that networks between political and business elites play in shaping political inequality. We currently pilot a data collection and coding of news paper articles using LLMs to assess the possibility of analyzin elite connections at scale. We further analyse the effect of connections between Members of Parliament and business elites on housing markets in the German context.

Telecommunications Ownership and Control

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This project is motivated by the observation that empirical studies on the determinants and effects of internet access typically treat the internet as a “black box” neglecting the different actors involved in providing and manipulating internet access. Together with researchers at the University of St.Gallen and the University of Melbourne, we provide the first large-scale data collection of telecommunications companies and their shareholders, the Telecommunications and and Control (TOSCO) data set.

Published papers related to this project introduce the TOSCO data set and showcase its importance in evaluating the effect of internet penetration on political outcomes such as democratization and corruption. We further provide a dashboard making the data set available to other researchers and showcasing different aggregations of the data set.

Transnational information suppression

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In this project, I explore the conditions under which authoritarian states deploy identity-based narratives across borders and how these narratives influence migrants’ political attitudes, identity formation, and political engagement. An initial study examines how identity-based news influences the attitudes of Chinese migrants in Europe toward China and their respective host countries with data collection scheduled for March 2026.