Senior Lecturer in Political Science Otto-Suhr-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
I study the political psychology of emotions, populism, and federal politics, working with panel data, survey experiments, and computational text analysis.
01Current Research
all projects →Not Like Them
Negational identities: the groups people refuse to belong to, and what these refusals mean for democratic cohesion.
StateParl
A text corpus of plenary protocols from all 16 German state parliaments, opening subnational politics to computational analysis.
FEnDi: Measuring Federalism in Parliamentary Debate
A validated dictionary for measuring references to Germany's federal system in parliamentary debate, and what it reveals about party strategies.
Regional Affective Polarization
How territorial identities generate affective polarization between regions, and what this means for voting.
Multilevel Responsibility
How voters attribute economic responsibility across levels of government, and why blame travels upward more easily than down.
ParliamentsMaiden Speeches
Who speaks first, and when? Time to first speech as a window on representation in German parliaments.
02Selected Publications
all publications →| 2026 | Decoding German politics with StateParl: A text corpus of plenary protocols in the 16 German Länder parliaments with E. Beltermann, S. Kropp & A. Souris · Politische Vierteljahresschrift | DOI Code |
| 2025 | To support or punish? Analyzing the relationship between welfare state attitudes and penal punitiveness with P. Starke · Punishment & Society | DOI |
| 2024 | Navigating conflicting incentives: Discursive strategies of political parties in Germany's cooperative federalism with A. Souris & S. Kropp · Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 54(4) | DOI |
| 2023 | Angry populists or concerned citizens? How linguistic emotion ascriptions shape affective, cognitive, and behavioural responses to political outgroups with P. Wunderlich & C. von Scheve · Cognition and Emotion, 37(1) | DOI |
| 2022 | The impact of emotions on polarization: Anger polarizes attitudes towards vaccine mandates and increases affective polarization with S. J. Mayer & S. Veit · Research & Politics, 9(3) | DOI |
| 2018 | Anti-elite parties and political inequality: How challenges to the political mainstream reduce income gaps in internal efficacy with P. Marx · European Journal of Political Research, 57(4) | DOI |