Welcome! I am Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna

My research, described in more details here, examines the conditions under which voters hold elected officials to account, and voters’ (dis-)satisfaction with electoral institutions. In 2021, I started an ERC Starting Grant called DeVOTE that aims to develop and apply a new interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach to study what ‘voting’ means for ordinary citizens in both established democracies and electoral autocracies (project duration: January 2021 - December 2025). I am also interested in new advances in quantitative methods especially in the areas of survey experiments, and text analysis, with a focus on the role of data in democratic processes. In a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund that I completed in August 2023, I studied how citizens respond to the compromises parties need to make to form governments and pass legislation in parliaments. In October 2024, I will start a 4-year project funded by the WWTF on citizen-centered democratic innovation, which aim to understand citizen preferences for participatory budgeting algorithms, (together with Jan Maly).

For my work I received several awards including the ECPR Jean Blondel PhD prize in 2014, the Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prize in 2016 and an honorable mention for the 2022 GESIS Klingemann Prize.

I am part of the Austrian National Election Study, the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I have been part of the H2020 RECONNECT project (2018-2022), a four-year multidisciplinary research project on ‘Reconciling Europe with its Citizens through Democracy and the Rule of Law’, aimed at understanding and providing solutions to the recent challenges faced by the European Union (EU).

I earned my Ph.D in Political Science from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in November 2013 under the supervision of Professors Michael Marsh and Kenneth Benoit. My academic work has been published or is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Political Psychology, Political Science Research and Methods, and West European Politics, among other outlets. I have teaching experience in both comparative politics and quantitative methodology.