Welcome
Welcome to my website. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Immigration Policy Lab and the Public Policy Group at ETH Zürich, and an Associated Researcher at the ETH AI Center. My research studies how media environments shape contemporary democracies by combining causal inference with large-scale computational methods.
My work on media persuasion examines the conditions under which news framing shapes political attitudes. Using observational and experimental data, I have found that news framing effects materialize under highly specific conditions, and are often trumped by partisan loyalties. My dissertation specifically studied the influence of the German media discourse on immigration attitudes.
I also investigate the erosion of liberal democracy by studying why citizens support illiberal actors. In ongoing work with Markus Kollberg, we investigate whether citizens’ support for such actors can be explained by a lack of knowledge about liberal democracy. We received generous funding from the Diligentia Foundation for this research.
Together with the Public Policy Group at ETH Zurich, I study the impact of platform design on public discourse. Using field experiments on major German-language news platforms, we show that even minor changes in content moderation practices can substantially alter user behaviour to improve the quality of online debates. In collaboration with the Public Discourse Foundation, we recently launched the Public Discourse Indicator, which tracks the quality of Swiss online discourse over time.
Finally, I am invested in the development and adoption of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods in social science research. Particularly, I work on the measurement of the quality of online debates and party accommodation to the radical right. I founded and co-host the TADA initiative, a community of over 750 scholars interested in text-as-data methodology. I also teach NLP social science research.
If you want to learn more, please check out my research and teaching pages (or send me an email).
News
2.12.2025
Together with the Public Discourse Foundation, we launched the Public Discourse Indicator
3. - 5.9.2025
I gave a Workshop on LLMs in the Social Sciences for CUSO
14.7.2025
Markus Kollberg and I received funding from the Diligentia Foundation to study partisan evaluations of democratic backsliding
20.6.2025
I received the Kaid-Sanders Award for the Best Political Communication Article of the Year
10.4.2025
Online-first publication in Political Behavior
How I got here
Before moving to Zurich, I was a PhD Candidate at the Dynamics Research Training Group and the Chair for Comparative Politics at Humboldt University Berlin. My dissertation was supervised by Thomas Meyer, as well as Heike Klüver and Rune Slothuus. I also obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Vienna and a Master of Science in Social Science from the University of Amsterdam. In Vienna, I was working as a Research Assistant to Markus Wagner, mainly on the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES). In Amsterdam, I worked for Gijs Schumacher, mainly collecting data for EUSpeech V2. Gijs also invited me to the Hot Politics Lab.