I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich, and an affiliated researcher at the ETH AI Center and the Digital Democracy initiative. I earned my PhD in Economics from CERNA(Mines Paris – PSL) and CREST (École Polytechnique).
I am an applied microeconomist working on the digital transformation of communication and decision-making, and on what artificial intelligence does to both: as a technology that organisations adopt, and as the instrument that makes communication measurable at scale.
Methods – I develop and release open-source AI tools for social scientists working with unstructured data: text, images, audio and video.
Applications – I study three settings:
Online communication: how political and citizen communication behaves on screens, and what it does to attention, attitudes and wellbeing.
Offline communication: what communities lose when their meeting places close.
Organisations: how design shapes decisions, and what AI adoption does to skills and judgement.
In parallel, I work with DemoSquare, an EPFL spin-off building AI tools for legislative intelligence.
Contact: hugo.subtil@ipz.uzh.ch
You can find my CV here.
Recent News
* 06/10/2026: I will join a public roundtable at the Grande Conférence d'Économie of Bordeaux Sciences Économiques: L'intelligence artificielle, une nouvelle révolution industrielle. Are we at the dawn of an industrial revolution? 7pm, Université de Bordeaux (Campus Victoire, Amphi Denigès). Open to all.
* 25/09/2026: I will present Betting Alone: Bar Closures and Far-Right Voting in France at the Webinaire d'Économie Politique Francophone, 2–3pm Paris time. Slides coming soon.
* 23/09/2026: I will present Peer Effects and Gender Inequality in Political Leadership: Evidence from the European Parliament (with Luisa Carrer) at the URPP Inequality Research Fund Progress Report Workshop. Slides coming soon.
* 17/09/2026: I presented The neural ideal point paper (With Philine Widmer and germain Gauthier) at the AI Lab conference of Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. See the slides [here].
* 14/09/2026: The fall semester starts this week at the University of Zurich! I am teaching Geographies of Resentment in Europe and Artificial Intelligence and/for the Social Sciences.
* 11/09/2026: I was live on franceinfo TV to discuss the closure of bars-tabacs and the rise of far-right voting in France. Watch the replay [here].
* 09/09/2026: I was interviewed by Le Nouvel Obs on Gabriel Attal's "1 000 bistrots" operation and why cafés have become such symbolic places in French politics. Read the article [here].
* 24/08/2026: New version of Left Behind: The Local Effects of Deindustrialization in France (with Brice Berland, Marco Tabellini, and Clémence Tricaud), presented at APSA. Read it [here].
* 22/08/2026: A short piece on Emotional rhetoric in parliamentary debates is out in the Bulletin of the Swiss Political Science Association (SGP-SSP). See it [here].