Chair for Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences

Somewhere like home from...

I am a Professor for Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at the School of Social Sciences and a project director at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), University of Mannheim. My substantive research focuses on electoral behavior, public opinion and comparative politics. I am interested in the processes by which electoral institutions pre-structure an individual's decision-making process and its consequences for voters, party strategies and election outcomes. My current work draws on research in political behavior and electoral systems in comparative perspective in order to provide a micro-theory of how actors facing institutional constraints form expectations about the consequences of their behavior. Moreover, I am currently involved in a new forecasting project, Zweitstimme.org, to predict the outcome of the 2017 election in Germany. I am also interested in political methodology, particularly in applying ecological inference models, item-response theory, Bayesian statistics and experimental design to substantive problems.