About Me
I am a postdoctoral researcher in political science at the University of Basel and an affiliated researcher at the University of Zurich. 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, political economy, and gender and politics. I work on the implications of shifting class and status structures for voting behavior and party competition. In my postdoc, I assess the consequences of the changing composition of the working class for the mobilization of service/pink-collar workers, combining analyses of party appeals and group identities. Starting in the fall of 2027, I will be an SNSF Ambizione fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich, researching the political mobilization of pink-collar workers.
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