Welcome to my webpage!

I am a political scientist at the Chair of Comparative Politics of the University of Potsdam, where I teach classes on comparative politics, political behavior, and research methods. Previously, I worked as a research fellow at the University of Vienna, the Humboldt University of Berlin and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. I was also a visiting scholar at the University of Essex.

My research areas include political representation, party competition, political radicalism/extremism, and quantitative methods with a focus on causal inference. In my current research projects, I study political phenomena such as democratic responsiveness, political violence, and citizens’ voting behavior.

My work has been published in different academic journals, like the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research or Political Science Research and Methods. I contributed chapters to books published by Cambridge University Press and Springer VS. Click here for a list of my publications.

My work and the projects I contributed to have been covered in various media outlets, such as Der Standard, El País, Haaretz, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Click here for an overview of my media appearances.

Currently, I am a principal investigator in the DFG funded project Powerful Polls? The Influence of Public Opinion Polls on Elections in Representative Democracies and the data project Political Parties, Presidents, Elections, and Governments (PPEG). In the past, I was part of the project Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) and contributed to the Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP).

News

April 2024	I had the pleasure to discuss what strategies are effective to curb the rise of the far right in Germany at the workshop How can mainstream parties best fight populism? Drawing lessons for Germany by pooling expertise organized by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. The talk was based on my research on the electoral consequences of mainstream parties' accommodation strategies across Europe.
April 2024	Against the backdrop of upcoming elections in the Germa states Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, I talked to the MDR. The interview is based on my research on the interaction between center-right and radical right parties in Europe and Germany, which can be read here, here, here, and here. Related interviews appeared at Taz. Die Tageszeitung, El País, NRC, and El Periódico.
March 2024	New (forthcoming) publication in the Journal of Politics. Denis Cohen, Tarik Abou-Chadi, and I propose a new conceptual framework, method, and data infrastructure to work with comparative vote switching data. A summary of the paper's key points can be found on Twitter.
March 2024	Based on my recent publication in the European Journal of Political Research, I talked to Deutschlandfunk and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Using a large-scale survey experiment, Christina Gahn (University of Vienna) and I investigate whether exposing citizens to margins of error in public opinion polls alters their vote intentions. We summarized the core findings in blog posts at Verfassungblog (german) and The Loop (english). This research was also covered in Der Standard.

Last Update: 2024-03-17. Hosted on GitHub Pages — Layout inspired by and based on orderedlist