About me

Hi, I am Theresa!

I work as a professor for democratic political decision-making at the University of Hamburg. Additionally, I am a guest researcher at the Zentrum für Zivilgesellschaftsforschung at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). Most of my current research focuses on democracy, digital politics, gender and immigration, often through the lens of party politics. I primarily study European countries, especially Central-Eastern European countries including Hungary and Poland.

Previously, I was a tenure-track assistant professor for Comparative Politics at European University Viadrina (2022-2025) and a Postdoc at the Chair of Policy Analysis at the Department of Political Science of the University of Zurich (2019-2022) where I was a member of the Digital Democracy Lab. In December 2019, I defended my PhD thesis at the European University Institute in Florence in which I studied the politicization of immigration and democracy. As part of my PhD, I was also involved in the ERC research project Political Conflict in the Shadow of the Great Recession (POLCON) led by Hanspeter Kriesi. Before my PhD, I obtained an MA in Political Science from Central European University with a specialization in political research methodology and studied in Frankfurt, Madrid and Exeter during my BA in Sociology and History of Science.

Methodologically, I often work with text (as data). This has led me from qualitative interviews to quantitative text analysis and computational social science methods. Most recently, I use (and teach) text-as-data, webscraping and various types of digital trace data. However, my work also uses other methods such as analysis of survey data and survey experiments. I do most of my work with R, but I also rely on Python, Stata and other tools occasionally. I have been awarded the PolMeth Europe Emerging Scholar Award for Contributions to Political Methodology at the first European PolMeth Conference in 2021. Previously, one of my papers has won the Best Presentation Award at the European Symposium on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science (full paper).

Some things that I care about: