Bio
Raymond Duch is Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and Long Term Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, where he serves on the Scientific Council. His career has followed a single question through four decades and several disciplines: how do you find out what people will actually do, rather than what they say they will do?
His answer has usually been to build the apparatus himself. He founded Oxford’s Centre for Experimental Social Sciences and directed it from 2008 until 2024, making it one of the places where experimental social science in Europe was put on a professional footing, and extending it through sister laboratories in Chile, China and India. He co-founded the European Political Science Association, where he remains Executive Director, and convenes the International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioural Social Sciences. Earlier, he directed the Social Science Data Lab at the University of Houston. The through-line is infrastructure: laboratories, associations, conferences and standards that let other researchers do work they could not otherwise do.
He now co-directs Talking to Machines, which asks what social science becomes when large language models can stand in for human subjects. The project builds digital twins — synthetic respondents constructed from real population data — and runs experiments against them. The methodological case is set out in "Artificially Intelligent Opinion Polling" in Royal Society Open Science; the most visible test was a poll of the 2024 US presidential election conducted entirely through simulated voters. The work extends into synthetic replication of published experiments, AI-designed randomised trials, and applications from Swiss referendums to Latin American development evaluation. He is a co-author of "Public Opinion in the Age of AI", a report of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on AI, Politics and Political Science.
Alongside the methods runs a long record of field research in health and political economy. He has led or co-led randomised trials with health ministries and international NGOs: financial incentives for COVID-19 vaccination in rural Ghana, published in Nature Medicine; tuberculosis screening in low-resource settings; and cross-national studies of who the public thinks should receive a scarce vaccine first, published in PNAS. His work on economic voting — how citizens hold governments responsible for economies that governments only partly control — produced The Economic Vote (Cambridge University Press, 2008, with Randy Stevenson) and a sequence of articles in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of Politics. An earlier book, Privatizing the Economy, examined telecommunications policy across countries.
Governments and international organisations have drawn on this directly. He sat on the UK Cabinet Office’s Cross-Whitehall Trial Advice Panel, advising departments on testing policy through randomised trials, and was a member of the OECD’s expert group on new measures of the public acceptability of reform. He has advised the Financial Conduct Authority on consumer financial decision-making, contributed expert input to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, and worked with Chile’s financial regulator on the design of consumer disclosures. He has also served as an expert witness in litigation, advising on the design and interpretation of survey and experimental evidence.
His current research is supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation Advanced Grant on whether talking to machines can improve financial decision-making, a UK Research and Innovation metascience award on equality and diversity in research funding, and a programme with the Inter-American Development Bank applying artificial intelligence to the evaluation of development effectiveness.
He has held visiting positions at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, the Graduate School of Business and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and the Université de Montréal. He has served on the US National Science Foundation’s political science advisory panel, chaired the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s committee on international issues, and co-edits Cambridge University Press’s Elements series in comparative political behaviour. He is founding director of Knowledge Without Borders, a charity funding conference travel for researchers from the Global South.
He took his PhD at the University of Rochester and his undergraduate degree at the University of Manitoba, and taught at the University of Houston for twenty-four years before moving to Oxford in 2006.