Research
My research focuses on comparative politics, including political behavior, political institutions, and political communication. I seek to understand (1) challenges to democracy as a system of government, as well as challenges within democracies, such as (2) changing patterns of political competition and (3) the digital transformation of politics. Some of my work focuses on Central-Eastern Europe; however, I also carry out broad comparative research.
In all three areas, I conduct theory-driven research drawing on a wide range of methods. While I have employed different methods throughout my career (including expert interviews, content analysis, protest event analysis, survey research, and causal inference), most of my ongoing research analyzes large amounts of textual and survey data, or applies quantitative and computational methods to large collections of observational and trace data. I have been trained or self-taught many of these methods, ranging from machine learning and large language models to image analysis, and am actively using many of these methods in my ongoing research. Having conducted research on digital politics and with digital methods, I also integrate digital aspects into many of the substantive research questions I pursue.
Contestation and Resilience of Democracy
Democratic systems that were seen as consolidated are facing new challenges worldwide. This includes democratic backsliding, but also the contestation of democratic norms. My research addresses how citizens respond to the appeals of undemocratic leaders, as well as resistance to autocratization with a focus on Central-Eastern Europe. My published work has looked into the politicization of democracy in party competition (Engler et al. 2022; Gessler 2024), as well as preferences for leaders and policy proposals that violate democratic norms (Wunsch and Gessler 2023; Kaftan and Gessler 2024; Gessler and Kaftan 2023). A recent publication also looks at the effect of democratic backsliding and democratic commitment on affective polarization (Gessler and Wunsch 2025).
In an ongoing research project funded by the Fritz-Thyssen foundation, our research team also investigates the the dynamics of autocratization and opposition to it in Eastern Europe and Latin America. The project focuses on the role of democratic experience and political opportunity structures in the resilience of democracy. Other ongoing work broadens my research on citizens’ attitudes by looking at perceptions of democratic backsliding and the evolution of democratic attitudes in Eastern Europe.
Political Competition and Party Politics
A second strand of my research looks at political competition, studying the dynamics of party and issue competition in democracies, as well as the rise of far-right and illiberal challengers based on media data (Hutter and Gessler 2019), as well as the analysis of large collections of textual data. Here, my work has focused on the issues of immigration (Gessler and Hunger 2022, 2024; Gessler, Tóth, and Wachs 2022), democracy (Engler et al. 2022; Gessler 2024) and gender (Abou-Chadi, Breyer, and Gessler 2021). Of particular importance in my work on issue politicization has also been the discourse of populist and far-right actors (Borbáth and Gessler 2023) and their effect on the political mainstream (Gessler and Hunger 2022, 2024).
Additional work has also looked at contentious politics, studying the role of regime legacies and opportunity structures for political protest (Borbáth and Gessler 2020), as well as developing and applying new methods for the study of contention around policy proposals (Bojar et al. 2021; Gessler and Hutter 2021b, 2021a; Bojar et al. 2020). In my present work, I try to expand these methods to the study of hybrid and backsliding regimes.
Moreover, I have several ongoing projects that study e.g. the effect of #MeToo on political competition or that further investigates the influence of far-right actors by studying the cross-national emergence and diffusion of illiberal policy frames and narratives on several issues, including democracy, immigration, and climate change.
Digitalization and the Future of Democracy
The third strand of my research looks at the digitalization of politics and the potential of digitalization for political science. I study changes to political competition through digitalization (Gilardi et al. 2021, 2022a, 2022b), as well as data-driven methodological innovations for research on political elites and decision-making (Gilardi, Baumgartner, et al. 2022).
Most of my ongoing work focuses on female politicians and the effect of stereotypes, drawing on media articles and digital trace data from Wikipedia. Different papers look at the portrayal of female candidates in news articles with NLP methods, compare online biographies of female and male politicians in multiple countries, and analyze clickstream data of Wikipedia users to measure stereotypes in political information-seeking. However, I also use these types of data to address questions such as elite persistence over time.