Regular Ph.D. Fellow, Cohort 2026

Research Interests

• Contentious Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Stratification
• Social Cohesion
• Quantitative Methods

Dissertation topic
Politicised but Unanchored: Institutional Ties in an Age of (des)politization

Dissertation abstract
Contemporary democracies face a paradox: unprecedented levels of politicisation, visible in what has been called the decade of mass protest, coexist with weakened parties and unions, low institutional and interpersonal trust, and fragile social cohesion. Drawing on the diagnosis of hyperpolitics, understood as intense politicisation without lasting organisational consequences, my dissertation project asks how ties between citizens and institutions are formed, or fail to form, in highly politicised contexts. Building on the impressionable-years hypothesis, it argues that cohorts politically socialised during high-intensity protest cycles develop forms of engagement that differ from those of earlier cohorts: more oriented towards non-institutional repertoires and less anchored in formal organisations and trust. Protest is approached as a key channel of politicisation in the current era. The project further examines whether social class and education continue to stratify political participation, or whether the normalisation of protest has reshaped this relationship across cohorts. Through a comparison of Chile and Germany, two cases that differ markedly in democratic consolidation, organisational density, and trust, but that share recent cycles of high-intensity youth mobilisation, the project assesses whether politicisation without institutional anchoring is a general phenomenon or whether institutional density buffers it. Methodologically, it combines long-running repeated cross-sectional surveys to disentangle age, period, and cohort effects, panel data to trace individual trajectories, and a news corpus to characterise the political context in which different cohorts are socialised.

Academic Supervisors
Sebastian Haunss
Sophia Hunger