Matthew P. Robertson

Research:

I am a computational social scientist at the University of Mannheim. I study the politics of information and coercion under authoritarian rule, with a particular focus on China. A recurring problem in my work is how to construct measures of political processes that cannot be observed directly.

My research combines close engagement with Chinese-language primary sources, large-scale data construction, and statistical and computational methods. I use political texts and administrative records to study elite power-sharing, bureaucratic signalling, institutional decoupling, and the organisation of state violence.

Projects:

Centralised control in the People's Daily editorial chain from 1946 to the present
Economic-threat rhetoric in Chinese state media and its relationship to economic coercion
Mock compliance, compensation, and institutional change in China's transplant system
Court-side measures of trafficking prosecution from Indian district courts
Goodhart's law in Chinese municipal social-governance work reports
Agentic loops for human-checkable atrocity prevention panels

Current position and background:

I am a postdoctoral researcher on the MZES Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection project, and I teach statistics in the Social Data Science master's programme at the University of Mannheim.

I also build research infrastructure, including Doctrail, a tool for auditable large language model-assisted document coding, and large databases of Chinese political, legal, medical, and media materials.

Before academia, I worked in legal and human rights research, translation and interpreting, and due-diligence research for financial firms. My undergraduate training at ANU was in English literature and continental philosophy.

Selected publications and current papers are here.

This website is was based on Hans-J. Boehm's. I find the style appropriate and it brings back my earliest memories of the internet.