Welcome to my Homepage!
I am Political Scientist, currently serving as Senior Researcher at University of Göttingen's Department of Democracy Studies. I am project manager at the department's Research and Documentation Unit on Political and Religious Extremism in Lower Saxony (Fodex). My main research interests include comparative political attitudes
and behaviour, institutional analysis as well as comparative electoral research. I am interested in the individual and institutional determinants of satisfaction with democracy and political
legitimacy. A full list of publications is available here.
My courses taught revolve around the areas of Comparative Politics, German Politics in Comparative
Perspective, Electoral Research, Political Science Methods as well as Social Science Statistics.
I completed my Ph.D. at University of
Lüneburg in 2007. Before coming to Göttingen, I held positions at the Universities of Düsseldorf
(2000-2003), Lüneburg (2003-2008,
2013 & 2018-2019), Greifswald, (2008-2016), Oldenburg (2016-2017), and Salzburg (2017-2018) as well as Technical University Dresden (2019-2021).
News
[News section opened on 4. April 2023]
NEW ARTICLE IN FRONTIERS
Together with Caudia Wiesner, I published an article in Frontiers in Political Science on the empirical implications of a conceptual innovation to investigate political legitimacy. Building on a genealogy of political science research on legitimacy, we conceptualize political legitimacy in combining an external normative with an internal empirical perspective, collect data for both and compare the relationship between these two dimensions of political legitimacy in an internationally comparative framework. Using data from Integrated Values Surveys and Varieties of Democracy we find that both dimensions are closely linked in general, discover important deviations from this pattern in the case of citizens' performance evaluations, pinpoint a particular group of hybrid cases that either lost internal or external legitimacy while collecting positive evaluations on the other dimension, and discuss the consequences of these findings for regime stability and future research on political legitimacy.
NEW ARTICLE IN ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR POLITIKWISSENSCHAFT
In an article published online in December 2023, we investigate support for the political system in Lower Saxony political culture during the Covid-19 pandemic. We find mixed evidence for a vote-winner hypothesis. In contrast, our policy feedback hypothesis, which focuses on satisfaction with the Covid-19 measures, finds stronger support in our data. Moreover, AfD voters support the political system to a significantly lesser extent than voters of all other parties and respondents with populist attitudes are less likely to express system support. However, this weaker system support of populists is balanced by satisfaction with the measures taken to contain the Covid-19 pandemic in the case of the Lower Saxony state government—but not in the case of the federal government.
NEW ARTICLE IN JEPOP
I am very happy to finally see another EuroVotePlus product published at JEPOP. Using data from an online survey experiment we examine whether candidates from a voter's Land receive more support than non-regional candidates. We find that regional candidates are indeed preferred. We trace this voting behavior back to socio-psychological identification with one's region rather than to voters' strategic considerations.