Projects at the Chair

The chair's research focuses on a variety of phenomena in comparative political science. Below, you find a brief overview of the chair's individual projects. 
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Alongside leading CIVILSPACE, Nicole Bolleyer continues working on the theme of intra-party conflict, both conceptually and empirically, a theme crucial to the functioning of political parties that to date has received not enough scholarly attention. This includes conceptual work with Ann-Kristin Kölln (University of Gothenburg) on notions of intra-party friction as well as a DFG-funded project with Martin Gross (LMU) on "How Mainstream Parties Deal with Conflict: Rules, Practices, Media Exposure" that deals with intra-party conflict regulation in four federal and devolved democracies. 

In her doctoral project, Emma Gordon is looking to explain the high rate of democratic transition we see in small island states. Specifically what she is working on right now is showing the systemic exclusion of certain states, particularly small states and self-governing non-state territories from the wider democratization literature, and the impacts that could be having.

In her Humboldt Fellowship project, Tamara Grechanaya investigates the evolution and diffusion of Russian digital propaganda, focusing on its role in sustaining authoritarian resilience during the war in Ukraine. Despite severe pressures, the Kremlin preserves legitimacy partly through adaptive digital campaigns that also resonate abroad. Addressing a key gap, the lack of systematic analysis of how propaganda narratives evolve, the project examines their adaptation to political developments and international spread. Using a large-scale longitudinal dataset of over 10,000 Telegram channels, expanded through networked reference analysis, it applies advanced computational methods to trace narrative shifts and link them to offline dynamics over time.

Thareerat Laohabut is currently pursuing a cumulative PhD project, alongside with a related side-paper. Her first PhD paper examines how new parliamentary parties in multilevel democracies respond to their initial electoral breakthrough—specifically, whether and how they leverage the presence of multiple level as an opportunity to establish themselves more broadly, from a party-centric perspective. To provide a more comprehensive understanding, she is co-authoring on a side-paper to explore how institutional structures shape the way these parties navigate their electoral trajectories (with Nicole Bolleyer). Building on this, she traces the electoral trajectories of these as they attempted to expand into additional levels following their breakthrough. Her second paper investigates why some new parties are able to seize the moment and transform their initial momentum into broader electoral success, while others do not. ​

Julian Manzano Gomez is currently working on a PhD project about judicial councils. Judicial Councils are independent institutions tasked with the governance of the judiciary, with the main objective of isolating the judiciary from party politics and strengthening formal independence. Despite these theoretical objectives, reality seems to differ. The project investigates the conditions under which Judicial Councils in European Union Member States become politicised, and what role do associations of judges might play. It aims to contribute to the literatures on politicisation of courts and judicial governance through a comparative study of EU member states with Spain as an extreme case.

Michael Neureiter is part of a large-scale collaborative project with a number of colleagues at LMU Munich’s Faculty of Medicine. The overarching aim of this project is to examine the causes of inequalities in health outcomes between migrants and non-migrants in Western Europe. One of the working papers coming out of this project examines the effects of discriminatory climates on migrants’ unmet healthcare needs, which results in disparities in preventive care utilization between migrants and native-born individuals. Other components of this project include an ongoing survey of 10,000 secondary school students, both with and without a migration background, in Germany as well as an evaluation of a series of public lectures which were designed to improve health literacy among teenage migrants and other vulnerable groups.​

Ida Nørregaard is currently working on survey experiments that test how different legal features influence civil society organisations’ political behaviours, as part of the CIVILSPACE project. Additionally, her research focuses on the factors that influence perceptions of discrimination, both among the general public and, as part of the CIVILSPACE project, specifically among civil society organisations. Next to her involvement in the CIVILSPACE project, she also works on collaborative projects investigating intergroup solidarity between immigrant groups and social mechanisms that influence or bias political opinion expressions.

Michael Zeller recently completed a two-year (2023-2025) project funded by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG HOME), the European Violent Right-Wing Extremism Monitoring (EVREM) Project. Working with a core project team and more than 50 country experts, it built on prior funded work and provided updated knowledge infrastructure about proscribed and active violent right-wing extremist groups in EU Member States, including their offline and online activities. Further, Michael is currently engaged in several research projects that address far-right politics and political violence. He is currently writing a monograph entitled Demobilising the Far Right: Patterns and processes from demonstration campaigns in Germany, England, and Austria, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Publication is scheduled for autumn 2026.