What are the consequences of political behaviour?

Political expertise at Witten/Herdecke University (UW/H): Prof Dr Lukas Stötzer is the new Professor of Quantitative Methods at the Department of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. His fields of research include political sociology and democracy research, political opinion formation, the positioning of parties and election forecasting.

Who and what influences parties and voters?

How do majorities form in elections? How do citizens form an opinion? What role does polarisation play in this and what influence does it have on German democracy? Professor Stötzer deals with these and other questions and is thus setting a new research specialisation. The basis for this is, among other things, his research paper "How parties react to voter transitions", which he published in 2020 together with the researcher Tarik Abou-Chadi. In it, they were able to show how voter transitions influence competitive behaviour: parties adapt their position to the statements of the opponents to whom they have lost voters, especially if they have suffered high overall electoral losses.

Research projects on coalition politics

Professor Stötzer has already been involved in various research projects: The project "Coalition Politics before theElection", for example, investigated how statements by parties that they would like to enter into coalitions with other parties affect voting behaviour. And under what conditions parties are prepared to signal to other parties during the election campaign that they can envisage a coalition alliance. In another research project, Professor Stötzer looked at the interplay between social inequality, migration and populism.

Professor Stötzer has previously worked at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the University of Zurich, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and the University of Mannheim. At the University of Mannheim, he received the Lorenz von Stein Prize for the best PhD thesis in the social sciences in 2015. He has been Professor of Quantitative Methods at the Department of Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Witten/Herdecke University since 2022 and has also been responsible for the Social Data Science (B. Sc.) degree programme since 2023.

As part of his work at Witten/Herdecke University, Professor Stötzer would like to dedicate himself to predicting the next federal elections, among other things. To this end, he is working with a team of researchers on the website www.zweitstimme.org to further develop his own approaches, which have already been successfully used to predict the last general election.