Regular Ph.D. Fellow, Cohort 2026

Research Interests

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

Dissertation topic
Politicised but Unanchored: Protest, Stratification and Institutional Ties in an Age of (De)politicisation.

Dissertation abstract
Over the past two decades, democracies have seen waves of mass protest on a scale rarely matched in history, from the Arab Spring and Occupy to Black Lives Matter, the climate strikes and Chile's 2019 uprising. Yet parties and unions have weakened, trust in institutions and in other people has declined, and social cohesion appears increasingly fragile. Politics seems to be everywhere, but it leaves little organisational trace. Some observers describe this condition as hyperpolitics: intense politicisation without lasting political consequences. This dissertation examines that diagnosis empirically. It asks how citizens form ties with political institutions in highly politicised times, and why those ties so often fail to form. Its central argument is that protest and institutional engagement have become decoupled. People take to the streets more often, but this rarely translates into party attachment, organisational membership or trust in political institutions. The project also asks whether this pattern is socially unequal. Has protest become a broadly shared repertoire while institutional politics remains the domain of the better-off? To answer these questions, the dissertation compares Chile and Germany. Chile is a young democracy with weak parties and low trust, where successive protest cycles have mobilised millions but left few lasting ties between citizens and institutions. Germany has a dense landscape of parties, unions and associations, but has also seen declining membership alongside recent waves of mobilisation. Comparing the two makes it possible to ask whether politicisation without institutional anchoring is a general feature of our time, or whether strong institutions can cushion it. Empirically, the project combines three sources: survey data spanning several decades to trace long-term trends, panel data that follow the same individuals over time to see whether protest changes their relationship with institutions, and a news corpus that measures the intensity of protest year by year.

Academic Supervisors
Sebastian Haunss
Sophia Hunger