Research

Much of my current work is dedicated to understanding the ways in which the refugee crisis, the COVID crisis, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine are shaping solidarity and risk-sharing in the EU at both the supply and demand-side level, and examining the social and political outcomes of these crises in Europe together with their effects on EU polity development and integration more broadly.
I have co-authored two book manuscripts focusing on conflict configurations on the demand and supply-side in the refugee and the COVID crises and their wider implications for EU polity building (one forthcoming at Cambridge University Press, and one finalized for submission at Oxford University Press).
I have been involved in coordinating a Special Issue on EU solidarity and legitimacy in the COVID crisis (published in Comparative European Politics), and one Debate Section focusing on EU polity building after the Russian invasion of Ukraine (published in the Journal of European Public Policy).
I have published several articles (e.g., in EJPR, JEPP, WEP, SPSR, CEP) and have a series of papers under peer-review exploring the drivers of political attitudes related to solidarity, risk-sharing, and redistribution within these crises and inquiring into the output legitimacy of national governments and the EU.

More generally, my research agenda is focused on political representation, political behaviour, and public opinion. My recent and ongoing publications explore public attitudes in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, and in the COVID and refugee crises such as policy preferences, performance evaluations of governments and the EU, including their political drivers and their electoral consequences.

Within the SOLID project, I am developing semi-automated solutions for protest event analysis. I have developed a pipeline for the extraction and automatic selection (using machine learning) of newswire documents for the creation of a dataset covering 30 European countries over the last six years.
I have published papers in the Journal of European Public Policy, Swiss Political Science Review, Quality & Quantity, Partecipazione e Conflitto, and collaborated in an edited book (published at Routledge) focusing on protest behavior, with a particular focus on European crises.
In my PhD dissertation I looked at the agenda-setting and policy impact of public claims making over time (2000-2014) and space (European democracies).In doing so, I have engaged both with investigating supply-side politics (issue positions of political parties – party manifestos, intensity of legislation in certain issue areas – comparative policy agendas) and demand-side politics (protest event analysis – automated text analysis, public opinion data – surveys and experiments), while theorizing about the links between the two.

My research within the SOLID project focuses on developing tools for the automated collection and analysis of protest event data (PEA) using text-as-data and machine learning techniques.
I have been responsible for designing, collecting, and analysing several European-wide surveys (6 major surveys covering between 8 and 16 countries), all of them also comprising of survey experiments.
My continued interest in social science methodology and in making user-friendly tools available to the wider research community pushed me to develop the SetMethods R package. This has by now become one of the default software options for QCA (about ~45,000 CRAN downloads, published in The R Journal - 2018).
My book, co-authored with Carsten Q. Schneider and Eva Thomann, ‘Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) using R: A Gentle Introduction’ has just been published with Cambridge University Press.