Welcome! I am a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University
I am a political scientist and obtained my Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2017. Before joining Harvard, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics. My research interests are in democratic representation, political behavior and public opinion, with a special focus on politics in the European Union. I study how citizens form their political views towards and in response to democratic politics, and if, when, and how political elites adopt these views in their legislative behavior. I am also interested in new advances in quantitative methods in the areas of survey experiments, text analysis, multivariate measurement, and time-series-cross-section analysis. For my work on government responsiveness in the Council of the EU I received a "Best Article Award" by the American Political Science Association in 2018.
DICEU ('Debates in the Council of the European Union')
is the first project analyzing politics in the Council of the European Union from videos of negotiations between national ministers. It scales governments' positions on EU legislation from automatic text analyses and human codings of ministers' discussions in Brussels. The analyses provide a novel view on how national ministers resolve conflict in the EU.
»The Council of the European Union« by Valsts kanceleja (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Intersections of democratic representation
develops a new theoretical and empirical framework to study representation as a multidimensional rather than unidimensional phenomenon. The project aims to make key advances in recent theoretical work on representation operationalizable for empirical researchers, and thereby close the theory-empirics gap.
»MEPs give their views on measures to tackle terrorism« by European Parliament (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Citizen representation in the EU
encompasses my work on how citizens' preferences are represented in EU policy-making processes. Do national governments respond to public opinion when they negotiate in Brussels? Do ministers of coalition governments represent their party's platform or a coalition compromise at the EU level? And which national voters are best represented by EU policy output?
»Pulse of Europe (Wiesbaden)« by Martin Kraft (CC BY-SA 2.0)