Lennart Schürmann

Lennart Schürmann is a Research Fellow at the Center for Civil Society Research at WZB Berlin Social Science Center and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. For the 2025-26 academic year, he will serve as a DAAD PRIME Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. His research focuses on the intersection of political participation and representation, particularly examining how protest movements influence political systems and representation structures.

Dr. Schürmann received his PhD in Political Science in 2023 from the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics at the University of Cologne. His educational background includes an MA in Political Science from Goethe University Frankfurt (2019), an exchange semester at EHESS in Paris (2018), a BSc in Social Sciences from the University of Cologne (2016), and an exchange semester at Sciences Po Grenoble (2015).

His research spans protest movements, social movements, political participation, political representation, electoral systems, European politics, and computational social sciences. Methodologically, Schürmann employs computational text analysis and survey experiments, with his current project 'Voices Beyond Ballots' developing tools for automated analysis of protest event videos. His dissertation examined political representation with a special focus on protest representation.

Schürmann's research demonstrates consistent focus on how protest movements interact with formal political institutions. His work combines theoretical innovation with methodological rigor, particularly through computational approaches to analyze political communication patterns and representation dynamics across multiple European contexts.

His current research projects include:

• Political Protest and Radicalization (WZB Protest Monitoring): Tracking and analyzing protest and political radicalization in Germany
• Empowering Voices Beyond Ballots?: Investigating representative claims by non-elected political actors, examining how social movement activists claim representation and how citizens perceive these claims

Dr. Schürmann has contributed expert commentary to major German media outlets including Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tagesschau (ARD), Quarks (WDR), taz-die tageszeitung, and Frankfurter Rundschau. He has held previous positions as Doctoral Researcher at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics (2019-2023) and visiting researcher at Pompeu Fabra University, WZB Berlin, and University of Amsterdam.