Doctoral dissertation project: Fabio Best, M.A.

The past two decades have witnessed an increasing susceptibility to crises in Western democracies on the one hand, and an increasing prevalence of social crises on the other. Fabio Best’s doctoral dissertation examines the political consequences of such crises, focusing in particular on the impact of political crises on people’s voting decisions in Germany. Particular attention is paid to the stability of the bonds between parties and voters and how the traditional steering effect of party identification on downstream attitudes and behavior changes in times of political crisis.

Doctoral dissertation project: Lion Merten, M.A.

For a long time, theoretical arguments and empirical analyses of the consequences of economic inequality were dominated by objective indicators such as the GINI coefficient. However, more recent research shows that it is not so much the objective reality as its perception that is decisive for political attitudes and behaviors. In his doctoral dissertation, Lion Merten examines how people perceive economic inequality, what factors influence these perceptions, and what consequences arise for attitudes and behaviors that are considered to be supportive of democracy. In addition to cross-sectional data, experimental designs are used in which the perception of the respondents is specifically influenced.

Doctoral dissertation project: Robert Welz, M.A.

While coalition governments constitute the central arena of political decision-making in many democracies, relatively little is known about how citizens evaluate coalitions and what factors shape these coalition preferences. Previous studies suggest that both policy-related and non-policy factors such as the perceived effectiveness of a coalition play a role. However, existing theoretical frameworks are often fragmented, empirical findings are frequently based on single-case studies, and experimental designs to test causal relationships remain scarce.

This dissertation project addresses these research gaps by developing and applying a comprehensive theoretical model of the determinants of coalition preferences. At its core, the project investigates whether and how citizens in multiparty systems (particularly under conditions of limited information) arrive at stable and reasoned evaluations of potential coalitions. The theoretical framework combines spatial and valence theories from electoral and attitude research. In addition, the concept of heuristics is incorporated to explain how citizens form judgments even in complex informational environments by relying on cognitive shortcuts. Beyond ideological proximity, particular coalition characteristics play a crucial role in shaping expectations about a perceptions of a coalition’s governing competence. These include, for example, the number of parties involved, past cooperation among coalition partners, and whether the coalition holds a parliamentary majority.

To empirically test the theoretical assumptions, both experimental and survey data are analyzed. The survey data cover all state elections in Germany since 1990, enabling a systematic analysis across a wide range of elections and over time. In addition, current survey data related to federal elections are examined. To identify causal effects of specific coalition characteristics on citizens’ preferences, survey experiments are employed.