I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Politics at Princeton University. I study why democracies struggle to address pressing economic challenges. My research examines how the incentives of political elites shape policy responses to housing crises, climate change, and economic insecurity, and how those responses feed back into politics.
My dissertation argues that democratic accountability can work against effective policy. Focusing on housing, I show that electoral pressure pushes politicians away from supply expansion and that electorally safe politicians permit significantly more housing.
Dissertation Project
Electoral Risk and Housing Supply
Why do local politicians fail to expand housing supply even when shortages are severe? I argue that housing has an asymmetric political cost structure—expanding supply imposes immediate, visible, and politically attributable costs while its benefits are delayed and hard to attribute—and that electoral safety determines which politicians can bear these costs. Electorally secure politicians absorb the short-run backlash from permitting; vulnerable politicians cannot, and underbuild. I test the theory using an original survey of 5,500 German local politicians, a conjoint experiment, and administrative panel data covering all German municipalities from 1995 to 2023. A US replication exploiting mayoral term limits confirms the mechanism: the same mayor permits 16% more housing when freed from reelection pressure. These findings challenge standard accountability models in which electoral competition improves governance: in housing, some insulation from electoral pressure is a precondition for, not an obstacle to, expanding supply.
Publications
-
The Green Transition and Political
Polarization
Along Occupational Lines
(with Hanno Hilbig and Erik Voeten). First View, American Political Science
Review.
Green transition policies set long-term targets to reduce carbon emissions and other pollutants, posing a threat to workers in polluting occupations and communities reliant on these occupations. Can far right parties attract voters who anticipate losing from the green transition? We explore this in Germany, which has ambitious green policies and a large workforce in polluting occupations. The far right AfD started campaigning as the only party opposing green transition policies in 2016. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show AfD support increased in counties with more polluting jobs after this platform change. A panel survey further demonstrates that individuals in these occupations also shifted towards the AfD. Probing mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that growing far right support is due to changing perceptions of social stigma and lower status. Our results highlight the need for a new research agenda on a backlash against the normative dimension of the green transition.
-
Climate Exposure Drives Firm
Political
Behavior: Evidence from Earnings Calls and Lobbying Data
(with Christian Baehr and Fiona Bare). Forthcoming, American Journal of Political
Science.
When and how do firms engage in climate politics? We argue that regulatory concerns, business opportunities, and physical risks activate policy preferences and lobbying efforts. We measure firm-level exposure to opportunity, regulatory, and physical aspects of climate change based on discussion in quarterly earnings call transcripts for 11,705 publicly traded firms between 2001 and 2023. We estimate the effect of climate exposure on climate lobbying instances (extensive margin), amount (intensive margin), and targets (political entities). We find that more exposed companies, especially in terms of opportunities and regulation, are more likely to lobby. The type of climate exposure, both absolute and relative to industry peers, dictates whether firms lobby, how much they spend on lobbying, and their choice of government target. Taken together, our findings demonstrate the importance of disaggregating firm-level perceptions of climate impacts to understand patterns in political activity.
-
GERDA: German
Election
Database
(with Hanno Hilbig, Florian Sichart, and Andreas Wiedemann). 2025. Nature: Scientific
Data, 12: 618.
[Website]
[Data]
[R
Package]
[Preprint]
Elections are the key mechanism through which voters hold elected officials accountable. The partisan composition of local, state, and federal governments, in turn, shapes policy choices and public goods provision. Yet studying representation, government responsiveness, and partisan politics across multiple levels of government—especially at the local level—has been difficult due to inconsistently reported, incomplete, or insufficiently harmonized election data at small geographic scales. This paper introduces GERDA (https://www.german-elections.com/), a panel dataset of local, state, and federal election results in Germany at the municipality level spanning the past three decades. GERDA includes turnout and vote shares for all major parties and resolves challenges arising from municipal boundary changes and joint mail-in voting districts, yielding a consistent panel of municipalities in their 2021 boundaries. We also provide municipal and county boundary shapefiles to facilitate spatial analyses. Our dataset enables new research on partisan politics, policy responsiveness, and political representation at fine-grained geographic scales and over time.
Working Papers
-
Place-Based Policies, Local
Responses, and
Electoral Behavior
(with Hanno Hilbig and Andreas Wiedemann).
Many governments use place-based policies to support economically lagging regions, yet these programs are vulnerable to retrenchment. This paper examines how local governments respond to reductions in national place-based investment subsidies and how these reactions shape electoral outcomes. Focusing on exogenous variation in the magnitude of cuts to Germany's largest regional investment program in 2014, we find that municipalities facing subsidy losses engage in debt-financed compensatory investment, particularly in manufacturing strongholds. Using fine-grained administrative data and difference-in-differences designs, we show that the net electoral effect of greater subsidy cuts is reduced far-right voting and increased support for incumbents in both local and federal elections. We argue that local countermeasures serve as visible signals of political responsiveness, favoring the local incumbent and potentially outweighing electoral backlash to the subsidy cut itself. These findings highlight the pivotal role of local fiscal responses in mediating the political impact of place-based policy retrenchment.
-
Housing Populism Under Financialized Capitalism
(with Rafaela Dancygier and Andreas Wiedemann).
This paper examines the rise of housing populism—narratives that cast financial investors as predatory, demand investor bans, and frame housing as a fundamental social right requiring state protection. We argue that politicians embrace housing populism less because it reflects economic realities than because it resonates with public moral commitments: distrust of finance capitalism and support for housing as a collective entitlement. Using U.S. property-level transaction data (2012–2021), a difference-in-differences analysis finds no consistent evidence that investor activity increases housing costs. Yet original surveys reveal widespread, bipartisan beliefs that investors undermine the right to housing and that government should safeguard access. A candidate-choice experiment further shows that candidates advocating investor bans framed in rights-based or anti-elite terms substantially outperform those prioritizing home-building through pragmatic or market-oriented appeals. Housing populism channels social-rights claims into symbolic confrontations between "the people" and financial elites, often displacing more effective policy responses.
-
Rent Control Turns Tenants into Market Liberals
(with Anselm Hager). (draft available upon request)
High rents have become a major political battleground in Western cities, prompting politicians to implement rent control. While rent control provides immediate relief, it lowers long-term housing supply. How do voters deal with this trade-off? We argue that rent control leads voters to become skeptical of interventionist politics. First, rent control reduces housing supply, which undermines citizen confidence in the state's capacity to correct market failures. Second, rent control benefits higher-income tenants, thus eroding trust in the state's ability to redistribute fairly. Drawing on two quasi-experimental designs from Germany, we show that beneficiaries of rent control express lower support for state intervention, weaker demand for redistribution, and greater backing for a pro-market party. These findings underscore how poorly designed policies can backfire, undermining political support among the very groups they intend to help.
-
Long-run Political Change after the Great Recession
(with Hanno Hilbig). (draft available upon request)
What are the long-term political consequences of economic crises? We assess the enduring impact of the Great Recession on U.S. political outcomes. We employ a difference-in-differences approach, leveraging geographic variation in unemployment shocks. Contrary to claims that major recessions primarily boost anti-incumbent, far-right candidates, we find that counties more severely affected by the recession experienced a sustained increase in Democratic vote shares, particularly in Congressional elections. These effects persisted for at least 10 years. We demonstrate that these results are unlikely to be due to persistent economic decline, demographic changes, shifts in candidate ideology, or fiscal compensation spending. Instead, survey evidence suggests that the recession lowered expectations for upward mobility, likely increasing support for redistribution and thereby benefiting Democratic candidates. Our findings expand the literature by showing that (i) severe economic shocks do not necessarily favor right-wing populists, and (ii) major downturns can continue to influence electoral outcomes long after direct economic consequences have subsided.
-
The Polarization of the Immigration Debate: Evidence from 9 National Parliaments
(with Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Rafaela Dancygier, and Ahra Wu). (draft available upon request)
We analyze parliamentary speeches about immigration from 9 countries using large language models. Contrary to common perception, US immigration politics are not as negative as Trump's rhetoric suggests: Democrats are the most positive party on immigration in our sample, and Republicans resemble European center-right parties rather than the far-right, focusing on crime and legality rather than economic issues. Trump is an outlier among US presidents. European mainstream parties maintained a positive consensus on immigration through 2014 and only began polarizing after the refugee crisis. This pattern suggests mainstream parties stayed positive longer than public attitudes warranted, creating space for far-right growth.
Datasets
-
GERDA — the German Election
Database
(with Hanno Hilbig, Florian Sichart, and Andreas Wiedemann) is a comprehensive panel dataset of
local, state, and federal election results in Germany at the municipality level spanning the past
three decades. It includes turnout and vote shares for all major parties, with consistent municipal
boundaries and harmonized data across different levels of government.
[Data]
[R
Package]
[Paper]
• [Media: Der Spiegel]