The following four areas are my main research foci at the moment.
Eurosceptic parties:
Together with Duncan McDonnell I am working on a series of articles and a book about the international cooperation of national Eurosceptic parties, their internal logic as well as the role of voters and the media. Two articles that build on this work have already been published in the Journal of European Public Policy.
In another aspect of this project, Reinhard Heinisch, Duncan McDonnell and I are looking at how the Austrian Freedom Party and the Italian Lega Nord blur their Euroscepticism. We propose that they employ Equivocal Euroscepticism. Drafts of this paper were presented at EUSA in 2017 and at IPSA 2018 and will be presented at UACES 2018.
Radical right populist parties:
In this project I, together with my co-authors, look at different aspects of how radical right populist parties behave.
Duncan McDonnell and I are focusing on when and why radical right populist parties cooperate or do not cooperate with mainstream parties. We focus on the perspective of the radical right populist parties, which are usually simply assumed to be keen to govern. For this project, we won an ARC Discovery Project grant (2017-2019; AU$190.000) and are currently writing a book about the cooperation of radical right parties in the European Parliament.
Together with Reinhard Heinisch and Fabian Habersack, I analyse how the radical right populist Austrian Freedom Party has (re-)constructed the idea of national sovereignty. Reinhard Heinisch and I also investigate populist representation by the Austrian Freedom Party and the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Voters’ expectations towards their parties:
In this project I investigate whether voters are as interested in political parties fulfilling their election promises as much as democracy theories make us believe. For this I won the Griffith University’s New Research Grant and ran several survey experiments among Australian voters. Two single-authored articles stemming from this project are out with the International Political Science Review and Electoral Studies.
Party youth wings in Australia and Germany:
Looking at the internal structures and decision-making process of party youth wings as well as their relationships to their ‘mother’ parties, Duncan McDonnell and I have interviewed parties and their youth wings in Australia and in Germany.
