Current Research

I am delighted to have received funding from the Tiroler Nachwuchsforscher*innenförderung of the state of Tyrol for my new project, the Austrian Study of Populist Backlashes against Liberal Democracy (ASPoB).

The project builds on my broader research on far-right populism, political representation, and party competition. It starts from the common assumption that democratic erosion and illiberalism can be understood as a conservative “reaction” to cultural liberalization and are thus partially owed to prior societal changes and globalization. ASPoB asks whether this interpretation holds, and, if so, what kind of unwanted “change” populist actors are mobilizing against. Are backlash narratives mainly driven by economic insecurity or do they primarily concern migration, gender equality, and cultural liberalization?

To answer this, the project examines how elites frame policy reforms and how strongly these frames rely on retaliation as a motive, particularly in populist mobilization. It then links this analysis to a triangle of democratic orientations among citizens: democracy may be regarded (a) as a vehicle for substantive, forward-looking policy change, especially when citizens hold clear and strong policy preferences, or (b) as a stealth-democratic promise of competent and efficient problem-solving; i.e., the “pragmatic face” of democracy. Alternatively, democratic procedures may be understood (c) as retaliatory instruments that enable citizens to contest and reverse policy developments they perceive as misguided.

By combining the analysis of political communication with a demand-side experiment, ASPoB tests how prevalent these orientations are, and what this means for democratic trust, representation, and liberal democratic norms.

At the ECPR Joint Sessions 2026 in Innsbruck, I organized the workshop “Blurring or Accident? Voluntary and Involuntary Sources of Ambiguous Party Positions and Their Consequences for Democracy”. Over several days, we discussed how parties generate ambiguity about their intentions and policy positions, where ambiguity comes from, how it can be studied, and what consequences it has for representation and trust in democracy more broadly. A core concern of the workshop was the question of how we can distinguish the various forms in which ambiguity manifests itself (e.g., vagueness, avoidance, ambivalence, inconsistent signals across arenas, or changing positions over time).

The workshop focused in particular on the distinction between voluntary ambiguity, where parties strategically “blur” their positions either to broaden their appeal or to manage internal rifts, and involuntary ambiguity, where unclear signals emerge inadvertently from factional disagreement, coalition constraints, or issue complexity itself.

A key outcome of the workshop is a planned special issue on ambiguity in party politics, which will build on the conceptual and empirical agenda developed in Innsbruck. The special issue will bring together contributions on the sources, measurement, and democratic consequences of ambiguity.

#ecprjs26

When parties come under pressure from new competitors, they often face a difficult choice. Should they adapt their positions to changing voter demands and accommodate parts of a challenger’s agenda, or instead stick to their core messages? This question has become especially relevant in debates about mainstream party decline and the resurgence of the populist radical right. Yet we know less about how voters make sense of these strategies and whether or not they take policy shifts at face value.

In my open-access article “A Question of Commitment: Investigating How Citizens Perceive Parties’ Programmatic Responses to Competition,” published in Government and Opposition, I study this question through a pre-registered vignette experiment with more than 2,000 respondents in Austria. The results show that voters do not only evaluate parties based on the content or direction of their policy claims but also assess whether a party’s response appears ideologically committed or rather motivated by electoral gain.

As the coefficient plot shows, parties are perceived as less committed when they move toward a competitor and away from their previous position. So far, so unsurprising. However, I also find that whenever claims touch on a party’s core policy areas (e.g., whenever a social democratic party speaks about social welfare) the party is seen as significantly more committed, independent of policy direction or discursive justification. This suggests that parties are, to some extent, constrained by their own ideological brands in terms of how flexibly they can engage with and adapt to new issues. 

This constraint is particularly strong among voters who hold populist attitudes. The interaction plot shows that among voters with low populist attitudes, the difference between reinforcing an existing position and adapting toward a competitor is substantial. Among voters with stronger populist attitudes, this distinction largely disappears. Parties’ actions are generally seen as less trustworthy and less committed.

The article therefore highlights a central tension in party competition. Parties need to respond to changing political demands, but voters interpret these responses through parties’ ideological identities and their own trust in political actors.

👉 https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2025.2