working papers
Below you can get access to all my working papers.
2026
- OSF
Democratic Hypocrisy: Unequal Tolerance for Protest in Germanyrevise & resubmit: Political Science Research & Methods, 2026Political tolerance is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, yet it is applied selectively: tolerance is lower for disliked groups. Existing research relies on abstract experimental designs, rarely examining real-world tolerance biases and their downstream consequences. We address these gaps through a preregistered vignette survey experiment (N=5,000) in Germany, comparing public reactions to identical protest tactics (road blockades) used by farmers and climate activists. Respondents were significantly more likely to support undemocratic responses, including imprisonment without trial, when protests involved climate activists. They were also less willing to grant climate activists key democratic rights, such as the freedom to assemble and to protest. Additionally, democratic hypocrisy also shaped support to identical anti-democratic rhetoric from fellow citizens, creating the potential to further normalize intolerance. Our findings underline that democratic hypocrisy extends beyond elites to ordinary citizens, challenging assumptions about the robustness of democratic norms. By studying real-world political conflicts, we improve external validity and highlight how political biases shape democratic attitudes and behavior.
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Norms over Preferences: How Social Expectations and Partisan Cues Shape Online Deliberation2026Deliberative mini-publics are widely promoted as tools of democratic renewal, yet deliberation increasingly unfolds online, where social cues and normative pressures differ from face-to-face settings. While existing research evaluates opinion change and deliberative quality, we know less about how identity-based signals structure behavior in digital mini-publics. We present evidence from a large, pre-registered visual conjoint experiment in Germany that emulates the online platform of the Conference on the Future of Europe. Participants evaluated realistic policy proposals varying in partisan affiliation, demographic traits, geographic proximity, and visible public endorsements. We find that partisan identity functions as a powerful normative cue: proposals from out-party actors are systematically discounted; even when substantively aligned with participants’ views. Demographic cues matter little. Public endorsement signals shape perceptions of others’ attitudes but rarely affect individual behavior, suggesting pluralistic ignorance. These findings indicate that online deliberation is structured by norm-guided conformity, constraining cross-cutting agreement and limiting the epistemic potential of digital mini-publics.
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When Social Democrats Move Right on Migration, Who Responds? Lessons from Germany’s Social Democratswith Johanna M. Schulte2026Social democratic parties increasingly seek to appeal to voters by adopting restrictive positions on immigration. Research indicates that such appeals are unlikely to help: they may alienate left-leaning voters and legitimize far-right frames. We examine this in the context of former Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s turn on immigration – a historic shift for Germany’s Social Democrats, who had previously avoided restrictive stances on migration. Using an unexpected event design and data from the European Social Survey, we find that SPD supporters remained unaffected, while attitudes in the political center briefly shifted toward more restrictive views. These effects faded quickly and did not translate into higher support for the SPD, suggesting that accommodation offers little electoral reward.
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Citizens’ Narrow Views of Democracy: Insights from Open-Ended Survey Responses2026How do citizens define democracy when asked to use their own words? While a large literature shows that citizens endorse liberal and electoral principles when prompted, far less is known about how democracy is understood \textitspontaneously. We address this gap using more than 25,000 open-ended survey responses from representative population samples in 14 countries. Relying on fine-tuned large language models, we inductively classify citizens’ definitions of democracy without imposing predefined dimensions. Across countries, we find that citizens most commonly associate democracy with vague notions of “freedom,” while comparatively few articulate multidimensional understandings that combine electoral, liberal, or egalitarian elements. This contrast is especially pronounced among far-right voters, who disproportionately advance one-dimensional, majoritarian conceptions of democracy and largely disregard its egalitarian foundations. Our findings demonstrate a systematic gap between citizens’ endorsement of democratic principles when prompted and their default conceptions of democracy when reflecting themselves freely. This gap helps explain how broad democratic support can coexist with conceptual thinness and asymmetric understandings of democracy across political groups.
2025
- OSF
Using the Party as a Shield? How British MPs Explain Policy Positions to Constituentswith Vanessa Cheng-Matsuno, Gidon Cohen, and 6 more authorsrevise & resubmit: British Journal of Political Science, 2025How do legislators respond to constituents’ requests? Recent studies showcase that US legislators are particularly responsive to their voters, even tailoring their messages toward them. But little research investigates if these findings hold for parliamentary systems which are characterized by high party discipline forcing legislators to fall in line. We theorize that in such systems legislators use their party as a shield if their opinion contradicts their constituents’ positional wishes. We test our argument in an audit study involving both legislators and actual voters during the Brexit negotiations in 2019 in the United Kingdom. Contrary to conventional wisdom about party-dominated systems we find no evidence that MPs are less responsive to correspondence from party-incongruent constituents nor that they use their party as a shield. These null findings have important implications for our understanding of how legislative behavior in parliamentary systems is (not) constrained by party discipline.
- OSF
The Consequences of Punishing Political Ideologies in Democracies – Evidence from Employment Bans in Germanywith Vicente Valentim,2025How can states counter growing political radicalism? We look at the effect of states persecuting “extreme” individuals by studying the case of the Anti-Radical Decree in West Germany. Implemented in 1972, this policy allowed individuals with connections to mostly communist groups to be banned from working in the public sector. Drawing upon a newly collected data set of individuals targeted by the bans, we run regression models to estimate the effect of such bans on the political behavior of German citizens measured in surveys and official election results. In particular, we look at the long-term effects of the bans by estimating their effects on establishing the Green party, formed a few years after the policy was first implemented. We find that counties that experienced bans are significantly more likely to take protest against the bans on the streets and subsequently vote for the Green party. Added to that individuals, who voice opposition to the bans in surveys are more likely to support the Greens. The effect is stronger in counties that were more leftist, politicized, and had more public sector workers. Our findings have implications for the sets of policies democracies can use to ensure their institutional survival.
- OSF
Does Protest Affect Bystanders? Field Experimental Evidence from Germanywith Violeta Haas, Ferdinand Geißler, and 6 more authors2025Despite decades of scholarship on protest effects, we know little about how bystanders, citizens who merely observe protests without participating, are affected by them. Understanding the impact of protest on bystanders is crucial as they constitute the silent majority whose latent support, normative beliefs, and concrete actions can make or break a movement’s broader societal impact. We address this gap with a novel field experiment in Berlin, Germany, randomly routing pedestrians past (treatment) or away from control three large-scale Fridays for Future (FFF) climate strikes. Additionally, we conducted a one-month follow-up to assess the persistence of effects. We find no detectable impact on climate attitudes, vote intentions, or norm perceptions but a substantial increase in immediate donations to climate causes. These results suggest that protest is more likely to influence bystanders through immediate behavioral cues than through changes in attitudes or norms. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption in both scholarship and public discourse that protests reshape public opinion in a direct and unmediated way, calling for renewed theorizing of protest effects that centers on observers’ immediate behavioral activation rather than just opinion change mechanisms.
- OSF
Democratic Transgressions Embedded in Reality2025Research on citizens and democratic backsliding has skyrocketed over the past decade. Most of this research has focused on why citizens might tolerate hypothetical undemocratic behavior carried out in the abstract by hypothetical actors. We present a theoretical framework and use a two-wave panel survey from six challenged democracies (the United States, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, and India) to assess the consequences of this approach. In the first wave, we develop an alternative survey instrument based on real-world democratic transgressions and compare support for such transgressions to typical hypothetical behaviors. In the second wave, we construct an intervention to compare how easily support for real-world transgressions is moved vis-à-vis support for hypothetical transgressions. Our results show that support for real-world undemocratic behaviors is substantially higher but also easier to intervene against. We therefore question two core findings of existing research: that citizens on balance oppose undemocratic behaviors and that interventions against undemocratic behavior often are ineffective.
2024
- OSF
How Citizens Perceive Others: The Role of Social Norms for Democracies2024Generations of political scientists seek to understand the relationship between citizens’ democratic values and democratic stability. The key premise of this research tradition is that democratic societies live on a “social consensus” over a set of democratic values; a democratic norm. Yet, until today scholarship has neither carefully theorized the role of nor measured the social nature of this consensus. Building on research in social psychology, we conceptualize democratic norms as social norms: citizens may think that most people in democracies support its institutions (descriptive norm) and also that one ought to do so (injunctive norm). We then measure these perceptions across 14 countries using nationally representative surveys covering 31% of the world’s population. We find that citizens have a strong perception of social democratic norms; however, mostly on abstract forms of support. Using a vignette experiment we also reveal that respondents’ preferences are conditional on their perception of social norms. Our research has important implications for research on democracy showcasing the role social norms play to craft democratic support in our societies.
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Can Populist Parties Increase Electoral Turnout? The Case of the M5S Movement in Italy2024Can populist parties increase electoral turnout? On the one hand, classical scholarship suggests that populist movements mobilize disenfranchised citizens by providing an alternative to established parties – the “corrective for democracy” hypothesis. On the other hand, populist parties might as well decrease voter turnout by inflaming societal divides and excluding minority groups. We turn to the Italian Movimento Cinque Stelle, arguably one of the most relevant populist parties, which followed the unusual practice of coordinating all political activities on a public online platform. We webscraped the entire event history of the Movement’s more than 1,000 local branches with over 200,000 geocoded political activities to study how the staggered local emergence of M5S chapters affects electoral turnout. Using staggered difference-in-differences models on election results and surveys spanning thirty years, our preliminary analyses suggest that the rise of M5S decreases turnout. Our findings have important implications for the study of turnout in contemporary democracies and the negative consequences of populism in the electoral arena.
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Parliamentary representation and right-wing violence: Evidence from Nazi street brawls in the Weimar Republic2024A core promise of democracy is to transform political violence into non-violent, institutionalized conflict in parliament. But elections can also incite bloodshed: they can trigger grievances among election losers and equip election winners who oppose democracy—such as the fascist right—with resources to orchestrate even more violence. Does parliamentary representation curb or fuel right-wing street violence? We investigate this question in the context of the July 1932 Reichstag elections in Weimar Germany. We match the home towns of Nazi party candidates to locations of street violence from digitized Prussian police records. Exploiting the randomness between candidates who did and did not receive just enough votes to attain a Reichstag seat we identify the effects of Nazi representation in parliament on street brawls in the Weimar Republic. Initial results indicate that parliamentary representation led to more street violence in elected candidates’ home towns, especially when NSDAP candidates had links to the Nazi paramilitary organization, the SA. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of post-election violence, consequences of right-wing representation, and democratic stability.
2023
- OSF
(Mis-)Perceiving Support for Democracy: The Role of Social Norms for Democracies2023Generations of political scientists seek to understand the relationship between citizens’ democratic values and democratic stability. The key premise of this research tradition is that democratic societies live on a “social consensus” over a set of democratic values; a democratic norm. Yet, until today scholarship has neither carefully theorized the role of nor measured this social consensus. Building on research in social psychology, we conceptualize democratic norms as social norms: citizens may think that most people in democracies support its institutions (descriptive norm) and also that one ought to do so (injunctive norm). Based on this, we provide a theoretical framework and derive observable implications of which country- and individual-level characteristics structure social democratic norms. Using existing surveys and large-scale original survey experiments, we will then measure these democratic norms in up to 15 democracies. Our research has important implications for research on democracy showcasing the role social norms play to craft democratic support in our societies.
2022
- OSF
Place-Based Policies and Inequality Within Regions2022What are the distributional effects of placed-based policies? Drawing on household data from 2.4 million survey respondents in the European Union (EU), we show that income inequality within European regions is substantial, has widened since the 1990s and contributes more to overall inequality than cross-regional inequality. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs, we find that the world’s largest place-based policy, the EU’s Cohesion Policy, increases incomes for affluent households but barely affects low-income households in supported regions. Evidence on mechanisms demonstrates that place-based funds exacerbate intra-regional inequality by primarily boosting labor incomes for the highly skilled.
2021
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The Political Legacies of Military Service: Evidence From a Natural Experimentavailable upon request, 2021Does military service affect draftees’ political attitudes after service? While a rich body of research investigates the effects of combat participation on soldiers’ attitudes, we know little about the effects of military service in the absence of combat. However, a widely shared concern is that the military socializes its draftees into authoritarian values running orthogonal to the values of civilians’ lives in democracies. I identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on recruits’ political attitudes by studying the quasi-random assignment of the re-introduced draft in Germany in 1956 using the German Socio-Economic Panel. I find that draftees are more left-leaning and show higher trust in foreigners even 40 years after their service; but also that in most regards serving has no effects on recruits. To better understand the mechanisms behind these long-term legacy effects I rely on a three-wave panel of draftees conducted by the military in 1966. Panel analyses reveal that recruits’ experiences during service do not travel beyond the workplace. Overall, the findings imply that in many ways our experiences at our workplaces might have a much smaller effect on our attitudes and values than previous research suggests.
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Does Exposure to Radical Right Rallies Affect Political Behavior and Preferences – Evidence From the Far Right Pegida Movement in Germanyavailable upon request, 2021What are the effects of far right movements on citizens’ electoral behavior and preferences? Previous research implies that protests and social movements can sway the public towards their goals. However research that actually studies the effect of local protests on the local community and public is scarce. Collecting the full history of local mobilization by a German anti-migration, radical right movement – the ‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamicisation of the Occident (PEGIDA)’ – on the street-level I study the effects on the affected communities by using Difference-in-Differences and matching methods. I find that PEGIDA increased voting for radical right parties and made the public support stricter limits on migration. But not all citizens react equally: the effects are driven by mainstream right voters, while the left backlashes. The findings have important implications for the study of public opinion in contemporary societies and political science understanding of protesters’ relevance.
2020
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How Perception of Support Drives Vote Switching to Challenger Partieswith Denis Cohen,available upon request, 2020