Herzlichen Glückwunsch!!

Wunderbar und herzlichen Glückwunsch!!

Find out more and apply Deadline: Thursday 7 May 2026

📣 Applications are open for the Summer School of the Standing Group on Parliaments!

🗓️ 27 Jul–6 Aug, Goethe University Frankfurt

@sgparliaments.bsky.social proudly presents its Summer School which offers a platform to:
✔️ Explore recent advancements
✔️ Present research
✔️ Receive career advice

⌛️7 May

While coalition parties align with the government, opposition parties use events to criticise. This effect is even stronger when media attention is high. We also show that external shocks increase internal party fragmentation, and therefore increase debate inside parties.

@christinastremming.bsky.social and I are very happy to present our paper on party reactions to external shocks. Main findings : Foreign policy events restructure party politics! You can find the full paper here: doi.org/10.1080/0964...

More details below.

🚨 So excited about our new paper in @BJPS: h7.cl/1iliZ! We (Corinna, Lena, Camila, Sarah) analyze how gender shapes the extent to which ministers are scrutinized by parliament.

Final reminder - deadline today! 🚨🦉

Advancing the Study of Parliaments: Structures, Actors and Processes at a Crossroads General Conference 2026, 8 – 11 September, Jagiellonian University

📣 Call for #ecprgc26 Papers
🛣️ Advancing the Study of Parliaments: Structures, Actors and Processes at a Crossroads
🪑 @sophsuda.bsky.social & @ortuttnauer.com
✅ @sgparliaments.bsky.social endorsed
⌛ Deadline: 9 Jan buff.ly/LtNLlvQ

#Polisky

Advancing the Study of Parliaments: Structures, Actors and Processes at a Crossroads European Consortium for Political Research

Call for Papers open! The ECPR General Conference is taking place in September in Krakow and our section (organised by @sophsuda.bsky.social and @ortuttnauer.com) is open for papers! Please submit by 5 Jan! Full details on our section are here: ecpr.eu/Events/Event... 🦉

I am very grateful for my committee Detlef Jahn, Ulrich Sieberer, Corinna Kroeber, Stefan Ewert and Kerstin Thummes, who were very kind, supportive and patient, and so many other people in Greifswald, Basel and beyond who helped me across the way.

Very happy that I defended my PhD Thesis last week about "Elites, Coalitions, Opposition. Party Behaviour in Parliament over the Legislative Cycle". Main insight: Time is important!

Cover page of the article. "Affective States: Cultural and Affective Polarization in a Multilevel-Multiparty System" by Dylan Paltra, Marius Sältzer and Christian Stecker. "Affective Polarization—the growing mutual dislike among partisan groups—has been identified as a major concern in democracies. Although both economic and cultural ideological divides contribute to ideological polarization, their affective consequences can differ. This paper argues that cultural polarization becomes especially consequential when mobilized by far-right parties. Using data from 116 elections in Germany’s 16 states (1990-2023), we combine more than 550 state-level manifestos with more than 150,000 survey responses to examine how party polarization translates into voter affect. Our analyses show that both economic and cultural polarization increase affective divides, but cultural disagreements fuel hostility only in the presence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Acting as a cultural entrepreneur, the AfD amplifies the emotional impact of cultural divisions such as immigration, employing affective rhetoric and provoking strong rejection from other parties and voters. These findings highlight the catalytic role of far-right parties in transforming ideological competition into affective polarization."

🚨Publication Alert!
My first first-author publication with @msaeltzer.bsky.social and @pluggedchris.bsky.social is out in @polbehavior.bsky.social, which began as my bachelor's thesis. We study how party polarization shapes affective polarization—with a particularly important role of the AfD. (1/7)🧵

⚠️⚠️ Prof. Stefanie Bailer and Prof. Nathalie Giger are collecting grants left and right - They are now looking for one Postdoc and two PhD students in Basel and Geneva! 🎓

👇 Check out the full job ads here:
tinyurl.com/postdocUNIGE
tinyurl.com/phdUNIGE
tinyurl.com/phdUNIBAS

Great opportunity for three four-year positions in Switzerland to do research on the quality of politicians

Abstract It is widely accepted in political science – and remarkably established in public discourse – that status anxieties fuel a far right backlash against progressive politics. This narrative suggests that right-wing conservatives perceive the status of women, racial, or sexual minorities as threatening. Using open-ended survey questions fielded in Germany, we show that women and minorities indeed figure in people’s perceptions of status hierarchies, but in very specific ways: First, overall, people still perceive status as largely socioeconomically determined. Second, sociocultural groups figure in perceptions of who is gaining/losing status, less so in perceptions of the top/bottom of society. Third, more than conservative voters, it is social progressives who mention women and minorities as “winners”. While on race/ethnicity, we find evidence for a backlash, on gender and sexuality we find more evidence for a progressive momentum. This matters for progressive politics today and for how we empirically study status concerns.

New article out in @cpsjournal.bsky.social with Tabea Palmtag and @dpzollinger.bsky.social 📝
We use open-ended survey questions (in Germany) to assess how and among whom social status shifts are perceived. This tests cultural backlash narratives in voters' perceptions.

🔗 doi.org/10.1177/0010...

Have a multilingual cross-country text analysis project? We just published a paper in @computationalcommunication.org with advice for validating your empirics! 👉 doi.org/10.5117/CCR2....

🎉🎉

Yeay 🎉

I feel overwhelmed and incredibly honoured to announce that I have been awarded an @erc.europa.eu Starting Grant for my project “VisibleQueers”, fully titled as “Making the Queers Visible: Partisanship and Support among Sexual and Gender Minorities in Eastern and Western Europe”.
#ERCStG

To Oppose or Not to Oppose? Strategies of Opposition Parties’ Parliamentary Support for Government Legislation | Government and Opposition | Cambridge Core To Oppose or Not to Oppose? Strategies of Opposition Parties’ Parliamentary Support for Government Legislation

🧵 New article out in @govandopp.bsky.social ! Why do opposition parties sometimes support government legislation? Should they not be, well... opposing? I analysed 75 years of parliamentary votes in 4 parliamentary democracies. Here is what I found👇🔗 cup.org/3JeLkw4

In our new study, @rozemarijnvandijk.bsky.social and I looked at who gets interrupted during debates in the parliaments of 🇦🇺🇭🇷🇬🇧. We find that women and men get interrupted just as often. Yet, when more women join the debate, politicians interrupt less.

➡️ Read the full study: doi.org/10.1093/pa/g...

Amazing office (4km to the sea), great working environment, fun colleagues and a mensa with the best Kohlroulade!

Conference presentation with rows in the foreground with people listening to a presenter towards the back of the picture

A group of political scientists are standing under the cover of trees at a wine reception on a concrete concourse

A presenter is pointing at slides while giving an overview of her research, with lots of people in the audience sitting in rows to listen and make notes

An auditorium with lots of people in the audience listening to a panel at the front of the room talking

Thank you to everybody that attended our #sgop25 conference last week - here are some of the highlights:

Increased risk: why coalitions with populists fail sooner Populism is a political reality in many European countries – both on the right and on the left. A study now shows that coalition governments that include populist parties are often unstable. But it is...

Populism is a political reality in many European countries. A study by @sophsuda.bsky.social and her research team now shows that coalition governments that include populist parties are often unstable. But it isn’t the radicalism of the party that counts, rather it’s the political style.

🏆⚽ Go Team!! ⚽🏆

Mit vollem Einsatz hat unser Team vom FB Basel und @swisspeace.bsky.social am diesjährigen Powi-Fussballturnier teilgenommen – und abgeräumt!

Vielen Dank an alle Mitspielenden, Fans und Organisator*innen – wir sind stolz auf Euren Einsatz und freuen uns schon aufs nächste Jahr!! 💪🎉

Populist concepts are not in line with the willingness to compromise required by coalitions, which makes governing with them much harder 👇

🎉 We are so thrilled to share that our amazing postdoc Magdalena Breyer has won the 3rd prize of the 2025 SAGW Early Career Award! 👏

Congratulations, Magdalena 💐🎉
We are very proud and inspired by your work!

@mabreyer.bsky.social
@unibas.ch
@dgw.philhist.unibas.ch

Happy to present our paper about the influence of populist parties on government stability.
Overall, populists in cabinet is one of the strongest predictors of premature government termination - but more in some countries than others

🔊🔊 Tuesday, 29 April is Sexual Harassment Awareness Day at the University of Basel.

We invite you to a German-English Roundtable to reflect on how our university addresses sexual violence.

We are also content to have our expert Jude Schönberg from the Basel Institute on Governance on the panel!

Not long now until registration for our conference closes - you have until tomorrow! All participants must register to attend the conference. We will be in the glorious city of Barcelona. Please join us! 🦉