Dr. Fabian Habersack

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I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Political Science, University of Innsbruck, Austria, specializing in Comparative Politics, Political Representation, and Populism. My Ph.D., awarded with distinction by the University of Salzburg, focused on understanding how political parties adapt to the rise of far-right populism, with my dissertation titled A Nativist Zeitgeist? Explaining Party Adaptation to the Success of the Populist Radical Right.

My research explores questions around political competition and representation, with a particular focus on how political parties and voters interact in the context of the rise of far-right populism. I investigate the appeal of far-right populist parties across Europe, examining the psychological, socio-cultural, and local-level factors driving voter support. This work also addresses the broader implications of populist success for democratic institutions and party systems. Additionally, I study elite-level strategies, particularly how established political actors adapt their programmatic and discursive strategies in response to the far-right. This includes examining the trade-offs political actors face between signaling responsiveness to evolving societal demands and preserving their ideological profiles and long-term policy commitments. My findings have been published in leading international journals such as the European Journal of Political Research, Government and Opposition, Party Politics, and Political Studies.

Methodologically, my work integrates a broad range of advanced empirical approaches. I employ survey experiments to study political attitudes at the citizen-level, conduct qualitative content analyses to explore changes in political discourse, and utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to study political actors' communication and policy strategies. These include Topic Modeling to identify latent themes in political texts and the fine-tuning of transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) for tasks such as detecting specific policy themes and groups in text corpora, as well as stance detection in political communication. Additionally, I apply image-as-data methods and automated analyses of parliamentary speeches and voting patterns to shed light on elite-level strategies and behavior. My work also extends to the development of new methodological tools, including innovative measures of policy focus and ideological commitment in policy statements that deepen our understanding of political competition and party strategies.

In addition to my research, I actively contribute to the academic community as a board member of the Austrian Political Science Association (ÖGPW) and as the Managing Editor of the Political Science Blog at DerStandard. Through these roles, I aim to bridge academic research and public discourse and make political science research more impactful.

I am also deeply committed to teaching and mentorship. At the University of Innsbruck and the Diplomatic Academy in Vienna, I teach a range of courses from substantive ones on populism and political representation from a comparative European perspective to courses on statistical methods, programming, and computational content analysis. Additionally, I also supervise and mentor graduate students on their paths to their theses.

For more details, see publications and current research.