Welcome

My name is Nicolai Berk, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Immigration Policy Lab and the Public Policy Group at ETH Zürich.

My research

My main interest revolves around political communication and its effects on elites’ and voters’ cognitive representations of politics, especially about immigration. Among other things, this concerns how news framing affects political attitudes and voting behaviour. To study these topics, I combine computational text analysis and econometric tools. I also did some work on the measurement of radical-right rhetoric and its adoption by other parties.

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.

About this Website

This website contains some information about my academic work, teaching, and my (hopefully somewhat up-to-date) CV.

Upcoming Talks

January 2024: Aarhus University
February 2024: MZES Mannheim