Welcome!

I am a Senior Research Fellow in the Data and Methods Unit at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. I am also the lead organizer of the MZES Social Science Data Lab as well as co-founder and co-editor of the blog Methods Bites, where I regularly contribute tutorials on research methods and social data science.

I study context-dependent explanations of political preferences and voting behavior, the drivers and outcomes of party competition in multiparty democracies, and the causes and effects of strategic elite behavior. My ongoing work embeds these perspectives in analyses of the political consequences of geo-spatial inequalities. Methodologically, I focus on advanced statistical modeling, georeferenced data, data visualization, and causal inference.

My work has been published in The Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others. Together with Paul C. Bauer and Lion Behrens, I am writing a textbook on Applied Causal Analysis (under contract with Chapman & Hall/CRC Press).

I frequently tweet about my research and about the activities of the MZES Social Science Data Lab on Twitter. My research has been covered in the international media, e.g., in the Guardian, the Luzerner Zeitung, and Zeit Online. I have also given interviews to national and regional media outlets, including newspapers interviews with taz, radio interviews with SWR, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and Deutschlandfunk Nova, as well as a TV interview with Rhein-Neckar Fernsehen.