Welcome

Good news: My new project together with Prof. Kira Rehfeld (climatology) “Improving climate adaptation policies for water resilience in Germany” will start in October 2024. Updates will follow soon!

The next POLNET Method School will be held at IBEI in Barcelona from January 13 to 17, 2025. We are happy that this time the school is co-sponsored by the ECPR. Our international team of lecturers is looking forward to teach network analysis methods from the very beginning – introduction to the basics and theory – with different useful tools like discourse network analysis, event networks or agent based modeling – up to advanced statistical network analysis tools like QAP or ERGMs. The call for applications will be announced soon!

As a political scientist, I am investigating environmental policy issues such as climate policy, air pollution regulation, water management, infrastructure politics and agri-food policy. After studying politics and public administration at the University of Konstanz, I completed my PhD at the University of Konstanz (2014) with a dissertation on political polarization in the conflict over Stuttgart 21. In my habilitation at the University of Tübingen on “Environmental Policy Networks” (2023), I apply a social network analysis perspective and travel along different decisional levels, political topics, political stiles and contexts, theories and methods, contributing to academic, interdisciplinary and practice-oriented research.

I have a dual affiliation at Tübingen and Heidlberg University. I currently work as a senior researcher at the University of Heidelberg and coordinate the project “Carbon emission information for local climate action”. Additionally, I am co-leading together with Kira Rehfeld the research project “ICAWaR – Improving climate adaptation policies for water resilience” in Germany with a team of climatologists and political scientists at the GUZ – Geo and Environmental Center.

Previously, I was part of an interdisciplinary research group investigating the ecological transition of agricultural and food policy in Baden-Württemberg in the “AgroBioDiv” project. As a visiting professor at the IBEI from February to May 2024, I gave seminars on discourse network analysis and environmental policy and contributed to the research cluster Globalization and Public Policy.

I am affiliated as “Privatdozentin” to the Institute of Political Science of the University of Tübingen. Last summer semester (2023), I substituted Prof. Jale Tosun‘s professorship of political science at the University of Heidelberg. I have been working at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen in a four-year (2020-2023) BMBF project “Common Public Goods. The Political Organization of Infrastructure Provision in the Regulatory State”.

Prior, I worked in the research group Material Theory of the State with Prof. Dr. Volker Schneider at the University of Konstanz from April 2016 to February 2020 and spent the winter semester 2018/19 as visiting scholar at the School of Government & Public Policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson, USA.

As principal investigator of the German research team of the international research network COMPON (www.compon.org), we analyse and compare climate policy networks in approximately 20 countries.

I am an active member of the POLNET method school teaching team. We organize and teach social network analysis www.polnet-school.de.