I am a political scientist with research interests in comparative politics, political behaviour, and political methodology. In the first two areas I focus on electoral behaviour, political attitudes and behaviour in Germany, the relation between social structure and politics, and on political knowledge and political sophistication. My methodological research interests focus on the spatial modelling of party manifestos, survey research methodology in general, computational statistics and ecological inference. On these topics I have published a monograph, a variety of book chapters as well as research articles in Acta Politica, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, German Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Analysis.

On this website you will find links to publications and working papers that emerged from these research interests. You will also find some add-on packages I wrote for R, the excellent open-source software package and programming language for data analysis and graphics.

Since February 2015 I am a professor of political sociology at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen (overview in English), where since January 2016 I serve in the University Senate and the Research Council.

Before my current position, I worked from September 2012 to January 2015 as ‘akademischer Rat’ at the Department of Political and Administrative Science of the University of Konstanz. Before that, I worked from September 2009 to August 2012 as a DAAD lecturer at the Department of Government of the University of Essex, where I taught European and German Politics. From October 2000 to August 2009 I worked as lecturer and later as senior lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, and from January 1998 to June 2000 as doctoral research fellow at Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). I hold a doctorate in social sciences (Dr.rer.soc.) from the University of Mannheim and a venia legendi in Political Science at the University of Konstanz.

I have been reviewer for a couple of journals, from the American Political Science Review to Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, but most often for the British Journal of Political Science and Electoral Studies. Since January 2016 I am in the editorial board of Electoral Studies. From its foundation, I have been a member of the supervisory board (“Präsidium”) of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wahlforschung (DGfW - German Association for Electoral Research), which among other things advises on the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES). Since May 2018 I am also one of the three speakers of the working group on election and political attitudes (AK Wahlen und politische Einstellungen) in the German Politicial Science Association (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft)

A full CV can be found here. It is a bit outdated, but I hope I can update it soon.