About Me

I am a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the University of Basel. I completed my PhD thesis on social status politics at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich in May 2023. During the Fall semester 2021, I was a visiting PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam, in the Program Group Challenges to Democratic Representation. I received my M.A. in political science at the Freie Universität Berlin, after studying in Freiburg and Krakow for my B.A.

Research Interests

My research is situated in the fields of political behavior, comparative politics and political sociology. I work on the implications of shifting class and status structures for voting behavior and party competition. In my postdoc, I assess political parties’ class appeals, with a focus on (new) working class appeals and their effectiveness. My PhD project investigated the implications of shifting social status hierarchies for political attitudes and behavior, with a focus on shifts in cultural structural hierarchies like gender and race/ethnicity. The focus was on the connection between perceptions of status threat and radical right voting on the one hand and on perceptions of status gains and voting for socioculturally progressive parties on the other hand. I use quantitative methods such as survey experiments and text analysis.

Contact

You can reach me via e-mail at: magdalena.breyer@unibas.ch