Visiting Students academic year 2020- 2021

September 2020 – August 2021
Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki
PhD Candidate
Department of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University where she researches the historical and contemporary development of political competition in advanced democracies. Her dissertation, in progress now, will combine quantitative text analysis and historical case studies to theorize the conditions under which political parties are most likely to appeal to group identities. She holds a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. from the University of Toronto, both in political science.
Visiting Students academic year 2019 – 2020

February 2020 – March 2020
Abelardo Gomez
PhD Candidate
Department of Political Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain
Abelardo Gómez Díaz has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Ottawa; a Master’s in Public Relations and Communication from the Autonomous University of Barcelona; a Research Master’s in Political Science from Pompeu Fabra University; and a Master’s in Politics and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz, Germany. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Political and Social Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University, with a special focus on mixed electoral systems.
Visiting Students academic year 2018 – 2019
September 2018 – December 2018
Willy Atangana
PhD Candidate
Department of Political Sciences, University of Navarra
Willy Atangana studies the relation between society (social trust), economics (growth), and politics (win elections). Somehow, he is trying to prove that the three of them do not work at the same time, therefore, we will be talking about the democracy’s impossible trinity. He is a PhD Candidate at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain.
Visiting Students academic year 2017 – 2018
April 2018 – June 2018
Ion Pagoaga Ibiricu
PhD candidate
Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute
Ion Pagoaga Ibiricu studies comparative territorial politics with a focus on secessionism and party system change. He holds a position as a PhD candidate at the European University Institute (EUI) since 2015 and has also been a visiting researcher at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.
February 2018 – April 2018
Christian Schimpf
PhD candidate
Political Science, Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences (University of Mannheim)
Christian Schimpf is studying populism, voting behaviour, and comparative public opinion. He has been a PhD candidate at the University of Mannheim’s graduate school since 2015 and has been a visiting scholar at Aarhus University (Denmark). He currently works as a data processing specialist with the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) Project at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
.
February 2018 – May 2018
Dieter Stiers
PhD candidate
Centre for Political Science Research, KU Leuven (Belgium)
Dieter Stiers is a PhD student of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Centre for Political Science Research of KU Leuven. He is mainly interested in elections and electoral behaviour, with a specific focus on the causes and consequences of electoral volatility and the restrospective voting theory.
Visiting Students academic year 2016-2017
May 17, 2017 – May 28, 2017
Corinna Kröber
PhD candidate
Politics, University of Salzburg
Corinna Kröber studies the representation of ethnic minorities and women in Western democracies. She holds a position as a PhD researcher at the University of Salzburg (Austria) since 2014 and has been a visiting scholar at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and the American University (Washington, D.C., USA).
April 10, 2017 – May 21, 2017
Alexandra Remond
PhD candidate
Politics, University of Edinburgh
Alexandra Remond is studying secessionism and independence referendums. She previously held a research position working on constitutional reforms in the UK following the Scottish independence referendum. She holds a MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge and before that worked in research centers at the University of Aberdeen specializing in federalism and power-sharing
September 28, 2016 – August 31, 2017
Jinglin Song
PhD candidate
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Jinglin Song majors in Political Science and does research on anti-corruption, political grass-roots party and political identity online.
Visiting students academic year 2015 – 2016
![]() |
April 1, 2016- May 4, 2016 Cesar Guzman-Concha (Scuola Normale Superiore – Florence, Italy) Cesar Guzman-Concha is a research fellow in the Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy), at the Center of Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). Before that he was postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). Cesar’s research interests focus on the making of radical social movements, the interaction between social movements and political parties, including the policy impacts of political activism, and configurational research methods. Currently he is engaged in a comparative project (with Donatella Della Porta) that looks at the ways in which grassroot organizations achieve policy change, looking at recent student movements in four countries. (https://sns.academia.edu/CesarGuzmanConcha). |
![]() |
March 1, 2016- April 30, 2016 Sergio Lo Iacono (University of Essex) Sergio Lo Iacono is a PhD candidate (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. His research interests include trust, social cohesion, collective action dilemmas, and social networks. |
![]() |
February 15, 2016- April 22, 2016 Ralf Esperschidt (University of Heidelberg) Ralf Esperschidt is an undergraduate student at the University of Heidelberg. During his studies of Political Science he also attended courses at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and Sonoma State University. His research interests include: US Foreign Policy, Comparative European Studies and International Conflict Research. |
![]() |
February 2016 – April 2016 Alexander Wuttke (University of Mannheim) Alexander Wuttke is a PhD student at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His dissertation is about voting as a civic duty and the interplay of norms and political behavior in general. Currently, he is involved in projects surveying German party members and a large-scale field-experiment on the effects of interest groups´ mailings on political attitudes in. His research interests include political psychology, electoral studies and political parties. |
![]() |
September 2015 – September 2016 Justin Park (Fulbright student) Justin holds a BA in Political Science/ International Relations and a minor in French from University of California- Los Angeles (’12). He worked as a research assistant at the Korea Institute of National Unification studying the current trends in North-South Korea relations. The following year he joined the Peace Corps and served in Cameroon for two years as an English teacher and a music teacher at a local high school. He also organized a city-wide HIV/AIDS campaign for World AIDS day that tested 1,000 locals and sensitized the public about the dangers and the prevention methods. As an independent Fulbright visiting student, he currently works on a research project on naturalisation among African immigrants in Québec. |
![]() |
June 2015 – February 2016 Leonor Flores (University of Barcelona) Leonor Flores is researcher of the Spanish Policy Agendas Project at the University of Barcelona. She holds a BA in Journalism and Political Science (Autonomous University of Barcelona) and a MA in Political Analysis and Institutional Assessment (University of Barcelona). She has worked as a journalist in media (newspapers and radio) and in press offices in both, private and public institutions. |
![]() |
September 2015 – August 2016 Felipe Colomé (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) I am a Sociology Ph.D. student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. I conducted studies during my master’s degree in Social Sciences about the political consumerism in southern Brazil. In this work I investigated consumption practices of solidarity economy movement. For my dissertation I am investigating the consumption practices of vegans in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. In this research I am studying how these practices can be perceived as new forms of political action. My research interests include political participation, political consumerism, sociology of consumption and social movements. |
Visiting students academic year 2013 – 2014
![]() |
February 2014 – June 2014
Elina Lindgren (University of Gothenburg) Elina Lindgren is a PhD candidate from the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg. Elina works on the effect of campaign rhetoric on voter perceptions of policy proposals. She will start her stay here by analyzing data from a new experiment where she presents respondents with differently formulated election promises. The recent experiment is based on face-to-face experiment in a central station, but she has also worked a lot with the Citizen Panel in Gothenburg. |
![]() |
March 2014 – May 2014
Bolette Danckert (University of Copenhagen) Bolette Danckert is a Ph.D student at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science. Her research focusses on the effects of ethnic diversity on interethnic attitudes and political opinions. |
![]() |
January 2014 – April 2014
Louise Donkor (University of Liverpool) Louise Donkor is a Ph.D student in Politics and Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests are gender, media and representation. |
![]() |
September 2013 – January 2014
Tamar de Waal (University of Amsterdam) Tamar de Waal is a Ph.D researcher at the Paul Scholten center, University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her research is on how civic integration tests fit into liberal democratic states. It is conducted under supervision of Prof. M. de Wilde and Dr. R. Pierik. Tamar holds a degree in international criminal law (LL.M, UvA/Columbia Law School New York) and also completed a BA in philosophy (honors, UvA, UCL). |
![]() |
June 2013 – December 2013
Annika Freden (Lund University) Annika Freden is a PhD student at Lund University. Her main research interests are strategic voting, contemporary European politics and statistical methods. She also works with experimental methods. Annika has a master’s degree in political science from the University of Gothenburg (2011) and have studied political science at the University of Stirling, Scotland. |