I work on political economy and comparative politics, and study time horizons of investive policies.
I am a Ph.D. student at Princeton University and received a M.Sc. in Political Science and Political Economy from the LSE and a B.A. in Political Science from the FU Berlin.
Work in Progress
Second-Order Effects in German State Elections: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Berlin, with A KönnekeAbstract
Reif and Schmitts’s seminal work on second-order elections has significantly shaped the literature on sub-national elections in Western Europe. Most scholars agree that sub-national elections are shaped both by the regional- and the national political arenas. While this question has been revisited many times using descriptive evidence from election results and surveys, scholars have rarely been able to construct credible research designs to analyze causal effects. We leverage the differential repetition of the 2021 Bundestag election in Berlin to gain causal insights on second-order effects. Extending the predictions of second-order election theory to our case, we find use a DiD-design and find causal evidence for two of its central predictions: second-order effects depress turnout and reduce electoral support for federal government parties. In the future, further macro-level estimates — relying on the exogenous marathon route and the discontinuous nature of polling booth assignment — as well as micro-level estimates — relying on an instrumental variables design — may yield additional robustness to our results. Our results exemplify the perilous enterprise of eliciting political preferences when less is at stake, with potential applications to central topics of political behavior.
Pre-Ph.D. Publications
What Drives the Intra-Party Democracy of the ‘Alternative for Germany’: Populist Ideology, Low Institutionalisation or Lacking Party Unity?, with AS Heinze, B Höhne
Party Politics 30(5): 795–807. DOI: 10.1177/13540688231183594
“Regional election in Berlin, 12 February 2023.”
Electoral Bulletins of the European Union 2023(4)