Research
My research tackles questions related to our understanding of how democratic politics works and how political actors respond to challenges from inside and outside of the political system. My core impetus is to learn more about how parties compete for votes, how they weigh between internal and external preferences and pressures and what determines, which policies they implement or which groups of society they target. I am further interested in the consequences of political action for economic, social and legal inequality, as well as voter perceptions of political communication and action. This includes questions related to political representation, ideological and affective polarization and (perceptions of) democratic efficiency or accountability.
My dissertation, The dark side of campaigning. Negative campaigning and its consequences in multi-party competition, combines content analysis, automated text analysis, crowdsourcing and a vignette-experiment to study negative campaigning. The theoretical focus is on political competition in multi-party systems.
Research projects
With Alexander Horn, K. Jonathan Klüser and Simon Rittershaus, we study the political determinants of economic inequality. In joint work with Anita Bodlos, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Christina Gahn, and Lena M. Huber, we investigate whether and how political elites respond to changes in the public issue agenda and if they use feedback on social media to adapt their campaigns. Lena M. Huber and I further research how parties combine their issue-based campaign strategies with social group appeals. With Lisa Hirsch and Marcelo Jenny, we examine perceptions of negative campaigning. In an interdisciplinary research project with Marcelo Jenny, Elena Rudkowsky, Michael Sedlmair, Mathias Wastian and Stefan Emrich, we use word embeddings for measuring negativity in parliamentary debates. Collaborative work with Sarah C. Dingler and Marcelo Jenny applies these data in a study on gender differences in the negativity of plenary speeches. Together with Thomas M. Meyer and Markus Wagner, we combine content analysis and plagiarism detection to study which party campaign messages attract media coverage. In joint work with Alejandro Ecker and Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, we use web scraping and text mining to explore biases in Austrian asylum adjudications.