My research lies at the intersection of public opinion, political behaviour, and political sociology. I study how attitudes form, what sustains them over time, and what they mean for democratic governance, particularly in increasingly diverse and polarized societies. I focus on how individual predispositions interact with political institutions and processes of political socialization to shape support for civil liberties, minority rights, and democratic norms. This work contributes to broader debates on democratic backsliding, populism, and the resilience of liberal democracy.
Attitudes Toward Marginalised Groups and Democratic Values: Drivers, Dynamics, and Policy Implications
A central strand of my research examines public attitudes towards historically marginalised groups and democratic values, asking why they vary so dramatically across individuals and countries, and what actually shapes them. Through original empirical work and large-scale evidence synthesis, I have identified the individual and contextual factors that most consistently predict where people stand on these issues. Economic self-interest explains surprisingly little; education, early socialization, and symbolic identity factors play a far more decisive role.
A key finding running across these domains is how durable attitudes turn out to be. The political and social climate people are exposed to during their formative years (adolescence and early adulthood) leaves a lasting imprint that often persists for decades, regardless of subsequent experience or information. This applies to immigration attitudes, attitudes toward sexual orientation, and gender egalitarianism alike. This has direct implications for how we think about public communication, policy design, and the limits of short-term persuasion campaigns.
Education, Tolerance, and Democratic Values
Why do some people, and some entire regions and countries, prove more tolerant and democratically resilient than others? My book Education and Tolerance examined this question directly, showing that while educational attainment consistently promotes tolerance, the effect is highly context-dependent: institutional environments, and the structure of educational systems all shape how much tolerance education actually produces. Subsequent work has extended this agenda to the conditional effects of education on authoritarianism globally and immigration attitudes across European countries showing that the educational effect is real but far from uniform.
Fairness, Legitimacy, and Public Perceptions of Migration Governance
A growing strand of my research examines how the public evaluates the fairness of migration governance, particularly asylum decision-making and border control. This work asks what moral foundations underpin people’s fairness judgments in asylum decision-making, and what the public thinks about the use of biometric data and automated decision-making in border procedures. Drawing on survey experiments across multiple European countries, this research has direct implications for the design of migration policies that can sustain public legitimacy.
Illiberal Attitudes, Populism, and Democratic Resilience
An earlier strand of my research examined the rise of illiberal and exclusionary attitudes such as populism, nationalism, xenophobia and their implications for liberal democracy. This work engaged with both the demand side (why ordinary citizens hold these attitudes) and the supply side (how political elites and institutional structures cultivate or contain them), with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe. A related line of research examined national attachments and citizenship, showing that civic nationalism is associated with better democratic citizenship, while ethnic nationalism tends to undermine it.
Data and Methods
My research applies advanced quantitative methods throughout, including multilevel, hierarchical cross-classified models, age-period-cohort analysis, meta-analysis, and survey experiments. I have also contributed methodological guidance on working with these techniques, available in my published how-to guides (see Publications).
Taken together, my research connects macro-level political transformations with micro-level processes of attitude formation, helping to explain the resilience or erosion of democratic norms in increasingly diverse and polarized societies.
