Photo of Marc Keuschnigg

Marc Keuschnigg

Senior Associate Professor

Short presentation

Analytical sociologist applying the toolbox of computational social science to three substantial research areas: cultural dynamics, social norms, and urban inequality.

I am Associate Professor at The Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) and Professor of Sociology at Leipzig University. I am member of the steering group of the Swedish Excellence Center for Computational Science, Vice-President of the International Network of Analytical Sociology, and elected fellow of the European Academy of Sociology.  

At the IAS, I lead three research groups:
The text analysis group studies dynamics of public discourse. Funded by a generous grant from the Swedish Research Council, we develop machine-learning applications for the large-scale analysis of text in sociology. Using digitized corpora as social sensors, our research explores swings in public opinion and the transmission of shared interpretations of societal developments and events.

The cultural dynamics group looks at cultural markets and social media platforms as testbeds for socially influenced behavior. One important research question is whether social influence is powerful enough to change people’s behavior—and thus render collective outcomes socially produced. Other research questions concern the spread of misinformation and the politicization of culture.

The spatial inequality group investigates the self-reinforcing dynamics of urban growth, the pace of life in cities, and the escalating urban-rural divide in economic prosperity and individual life chances. We explore the increasingly uneven economic geography observed in many countries in which cities’ attraction of talent and big cities’ extreme diversity add to growing levels of inequality between smaller and larger urban areas.

To find out more, please visit my personal webpage.

Online presence

News

Man in office with hand behind his head.

Extreme earners are not extremely smart

People with higher incomes also score higher on IQ-tests – up to a point. At high incomes the relationship plateaus and the top 1% score even slightly lower on the test than those whose incomes rank right below them, shows a new study from LiU.

Pavement full of people.

Benefits of big city life – only for the elite

In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Linköping University show that the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few.

View of campus norrkoping

Big city growth escalates the urban-rural divide

Microdata from Swedish population registers provide new insights into cities' economic growth paths. The data reveal a surge in regional inequality, with more and more resources flowing to cities atop the urban hierarchy.

Selected works

Three recent publications

  • Keuschnigg, M., van de Rijt, A., & Bol, T. 2023. The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners. European Sociological Review.
  • Stein, J., Keuschnigg, M., & van de Rijt, A. 2023. Network segregation and the propagation of misinformation. Scientific Reports.
  • Arvidsson, M., Lovsjö, N., & Keuschnigg, M. 2023. Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities. Nature Human Behaviour.

Three often cited works

  • Keuschnigg, M., Lovsjö, N., & Hedström, P. 2018. Analytical sociology and computational social science. Journal of Computational Social Science 1 (1), 3-14.
  • Keuschnigg, M. & Wolbring, T. 2015. Disorder, social capital, and norm violation: Three field experiments on the broken windows thesis. Rationality and Society 27 (1), 96-126.
  • Keuschnigg, M., Mutgan, S., & Hedström, P. 2019. Urban scaling and the regional divide. Science Advances 5 (1), eaav0042.

Publications

2024

Miriam Hurtado Bodell, Måns Magnusson, Marc Keuschnigg (2024) Seeded Topic Models in Digital Archives: Analyzing Interpretations of Immigration in Swedish Newspapers, 1945-2019 Sociological Methods & Research (Article in journal) Continue to DOI

2023

Martin Arvidsson, Niclas Lovsjö, Marc Keuschnigg (2023) Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities Nature Human Behaviour, Vol. 7, p. 365-374 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt, Thijs Bol (2023) The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners European Sociological Review, Vol. 39, p. 820-833 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Jonas Stein, Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt (2023) Network segregation and the propagation of misinformation Scientific Reports, Vol. 13, Article 917 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI

2022

Benjamin Jarvis, Marc Keuschnigg, Peter Hedström (2022) Analytical sociology amidst a computational social science revolution Handbook of Computational Social Science, Volume 1, p. 33-52 (Chapter in book) Continue to DOI

Research

Organisation