Research Agenda

Current Research Agenda

At the MZES, I'm working on a project on the quantitative analysis of political text. The goals include measuring populism from diverse text sources such as election manifestos, speeches, newspaper articles or tweets and to apply and advance methods of QTA while doing so. Ultimately, the measures are intended to be used for answering research questions on party competition (such as "Do mainstream parties adopt the populist rhetoric of successfull contenders?") and political behaviour (such as "Is populism on Twitter marked by lower levels of deliberative quality and does this affect political attitudes?"). A related research proposal is currently in the process of being included in the MZES Research Programme and will be submitted to the German Science Foundation (DFG) for grant evaluation. A contracted SAGE textbook with the working title "Doing Quantitative Text Analysis in R: Scraping, Preparing, Visualising and Modelling Data" accompanies the project. See GitHub for code and data.

Since 2012 (with related work starting in 2007), I'm doing research on empirical patterns of democracy with Prof. Adrian Vatter (University of Bern). The project, on which I focused most strongly during my time as a Postdoctoral Researcher (Oberassistent) at the University of Bern between 2012 and 2017, studies the character of democracy. The political-institutional setup of democracy varies with respect to the diffusion of power, affecting all of the behavior of political actors as well as the performance and legitimacy of political systems. The main goals of the project are a deep theoretical foundation of the concept of power diffusion as well a an encompassing, up-to-date analysis of empirical patterns of democracy, covering its determinants and consequences as well. This has resulted in a number of articles, and a monograph: Julian Bernauer and Adrian Vatter. 2019. Power Diffusion and Democracy: Institutions, Deliberation and Outcomes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A related project on subnational patterns of democracy is in preparation. See GitHub for code and data.

Prior Research Enterprises

2008-2012 Doctoral research funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation (Berlin) on the descriptive representation of ethnic minorities resulting in the publication: Julian Bernauer. 2015. Ethnic Politics, Regime Support and Conflict in Central and Eastern Europe. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. The project focused on the conditions of the electoral entry of ethnic parties, their success and the effects of descriptive representation on political attitudes as well as conflict behaviour. Quantitative models accommodating selection bias have been used.

2008-2009 Collaboration in REPCONG project on representation, together with Prof. Nathalie Giger and Dr. Jan Rosset (PI: Prof. Thomas Bräuninger, ESF grant)

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