Research

My research is consistently comparative: it takes the German party and protest landscape as its empirical anchor, situates it within broader European comparisons, and increasingly looks beyond Europe. Democracy, how it is contested, defended, and transformed, is a cross-cutting theme running through all of the areas below.

Protest, social movements, and democracy

My protest research began with, and remains anchored in, a semi-automated event database covering all protest in Germany since 2002 from Fridays for Future to the pandemic-era protests against containment measures. Building on this German case, my Horizon Europe-funded project ProTest (with Heiko Pleines and Sebastian Haunss) widens the lens to pro- and anti-democratic protest dynamics across the EU and its Eastern Partnership states, in the context of de-democratization.

On the individual level, I study what drives people to take to the streets, how exposure to radical protest relates to participation in anti-system demonstrations, and how radical actors can both mobilize and demobilize public support. I also study how AI agents and large language models shape political information-seeking and may reinforce anti-democratic attitudes. Methodologically, this work increasingly draws on multi-modal data — including social media videos - combining digital ethnography with large language models to study protest at scale.

Party competition, populism, and political communication

The German party system is a central case in this work: I study how the exclusion of the AfD, the so-called Brandmauer or *Ccordon Sanitaire”, became an electoral strategy in the 2025 snap election, building on earlier research on how radical-right parties shape immigration debates and mainstream party positioning across Western Europe more broadly.

Policy conflict and the welfare state

A third strand of my work addresses policy-making directly. Within the Collaborative Research Center “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” (DFG), I study how the scope and inclusivity of welfare state instruments shape political conflict, extending this work to the African continent, how social policy affects levels of contention.

Integrating computational methods

Across these substantive areas, I work to embed computational social science more firmly within the social sciences and humanities, regularly collaborating with colleagues in linguistics, criminology, computer science, communication studies, law, and history. I co-lead an infrastructure project (with computer scientist Andreas Breiter) that supports researchers across the Collaborative Research Center “Global Dynamics of Social Policy” in using computational methods from algorithmic classification to the analysis of interview transcripts and multimodal data. By doing so, we systematically explores how such methods can be developed further in a genuinely interdisciplinary way.