Welcome!
I am a PhD student at the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University. I work at the SOEP RegioHub, a project funded by the Leibniz Foundation, the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) and Bielefeld University.
My current PhD research investigates ‘politics of place’ and their history. I study patterns of political participation and representation across space and time. I rely on electoral data, survey data, and parliamentary speech data using quantitative methods.
Current projects:
Working paper Explaining historical persistence in Germany’s electoral geography across 130 years(under review)
Abstract [PDF]
This article studies the long-run persistence of electoral geographies. Drawing on cleavage theory, I argue that spatial patterns of party support persist where cleavages remain politically salient and the social groups they mobilise stay in place. I evidence this argument for Germany, combining electoral and census data from the German Empire (1890–1912) and reunified Germany (2002–2021) at the municipality, county and electoral-district level. The spatial analyses reveal substantial continuity in the electoral geographies of the mainstream left and right. The analysis traces both to one source, the persistent spatial distribution of Catholics. Christian democrats continued historical strongholds of the Center Party where Catholics stayed concentrated, while the SPD persists as its mirror image in the non-Catholic space. Persistence therefore rests on the stability of the religious geography and cleavage, not on the class cleavage and the economic geography, which has changed markedly. The findings position cleavage-based persistence as a complement to cultural-transmission accounts of historical legacies, locating continuity in the ongoing mobilisation of stable social groups rather than in transmitted attitudes alone.
Abstract
Urban-rural divides are widely described as a defining feature of contemporary Western politics, yet how far they depart from the past is unclear. This working paper extends the data collection of Huijsmans and Rodden (2025) backwards in time, assembling constituency-, county- and municipality-level results for national elections in multiple European and Anglo-American democracies including Germany, France, the UK, and the US, among others.
Abstract
Previous research has examined the transmission of partisanship and religion in families, yet has not considered the interdependent transmission of the two. This study asks: is vote is inherited independently of religion, or does religious transmission carry the partisan attachment with it? Relying on panel data from Germany and the UK, I develop and test a theory of joint transmission. Overall, this points to the family as a site for the reproduction of the old religious cleavage.
with Chen Zeng & Konstantin Wandel
Abstract
This paper examines how spatial inequality is represented in UK parliamentary discourse between 1988 and 2019. While prior research highlights a growing ‘geography of discontent’ and widening urban–rural electoral divides (e.g., McCann 2020; Huijsmans & Rodden, 2025), less is known about how structural divides are translated into partisan conflict. Drawing on cleavage theory and agenda-setting theory, we argue that territorial divisions become politically consequential when parties actively articulate and frame regional disparities within broader debates over redistribution, justice, and national identity. Rising economic divergence and electoral volatility, we contend, create incentives to politicise spatial inequalities. Empirically, we analyse House of Commons speeches from 1988 to 2019 using methods of computational text analysis. Next, we test whether electoral vulnerability—measured through party turnover and seat marginality—drives spatial inequality rhetoric in a difference-in-differences design.
Abstract
The study examines the salience of environmental issues. I review the current literature on political salience and propose a novel definition of issue salience, both, at the public (national) and personal (individual) level. Combining national-level indicators and individual-level survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP, 1993-2020), I show how the support for environmental protection is strongly related to environmental salience. Based on random slope multilevel regression models, the results suggest that support for environmental protection hinges on the the public salience of environnmental issues.