Welcome to my homepage.

I am a political scientist interested in the analysis of party competition and government formation in multi-level systems, political representation in democratic regimes, EU Cohesion policy, and social science research methods (particularly text scaling methods). Currently, I am Associate Professor (Akademischer Rat auf Lebenszeit) for Political Systems and European Integration at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. Previously, I was Professor for Comparative Political Science (pro tempore, 11/2020-03/2021) as well as Professor for Political Systems and European Integraton (pro tempore, 10/2019-09/2020 and 04/2023-09/2023) at the Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. Furthermore, I have been an External Fellow of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim (11/2017-10/2019).

I finished my PhD at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 2015. My thesis dealt with coalition formation, coalition bargaining, and coalition agreements on the German local level in general and with coalitions between the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) in particular.

I finished my cumulative higher doctorate (Habilitation) on “Dynamic party competition in European multi-level systems” in 2022 at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. The cumulus deals with party competition in local government settings, parties’ positions and issue emphasis of European integration and EU Cohesion policy, and party behaviour in times of crises.

My current and previous research projects can be found here.

Together with Michael Jankowski, I am leading “The Local Manifesto Project (LMP)”. This app is a new resource for analyzing local party competition by providing scholars with the opportunity to use several text scaling and topic modelling techniques. Further information on “The Local Manifesto Project (LMP)” can be found here.

More information regarding my research can also be found on my ResearchGate and my Google Scholar profiles.