Welcome!

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

My research focuses on the conditions under which citizens hold elected officials accountable for their actions. I also investigate the reciprocal relationship between voters’ satisfaction with electoral institutions and their political behavior. Additionally, my work delves into citizens’ fundamental perceptions of their role within both liberal democracies and electoral autocracies, and how this ultimately influences broader patterns of political participation and democratic legitimacy, including their openness to democratic innovations.

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. In October 2024, I have started 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 2017 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 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.

On this website, you can find information about my research, publications, and teaching.

Thanks for visiting!