Markus Wagner is a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. His research has focused on the role of issues, ideologies and identities in party competition and electoral behaviour, using observational and experimental methods. He obtained his PhD in 2009 from the LSE and has been at the University of Vienna since then.

Isabella Rebasso is a PostDoc in the PARTISAN project. Isabella’s work is at the intersection of psychology and political science: emotions, political information processing and sophistication, personality, gender, and political identities. She got her PhD from the University of Amsterdam where she studied the cognitive roots of emotional responses to political issues and the question how emotions in politics differ from emotions we feel in our personal lives. She uses a variety of methods, from experiments to machine-learning approaches, usually trying to combine experimental and observational methods to study these phenomena and to identify their underlying mechanisms.

Semih Cakir is a postdoctoral researcher in the PARTISAN project. His research focuses on political parties, voter behavior, and political participation, with a particular emphasis on partisanship and polarization. He earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Montreal, where he studied how elite ideological polarization influences both mass ideological and affective polarization.

Elena Heinz is a pre-doctoral researcher within the PARTISAN project and a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. Her research is rooted in political psychology, with a focus on threat perceptions, emotions and their relation to affective polarization. She is also interested in support for the radical right, political ideologies and intergroup relations more broadly. Elena employs a quantitative approach, using mainly surveys and experimental studies within her research. She studied psychology (BSc) at Leiden University and subsequently specialized in social and organizational psychology at Leiden University (MSc) and in political psychology (MSc) at the University of Kent.

Alexander Dalheimer is a Pre-Doc in the PARTISAN project. His dissertation focuses on the causes of partisan conflict and affective polarization. He explores both micro and macro-level explanations for the increasing animosity between supporters of different parties. Specifically, he examines the roles of partisan (meta-)perceptions, identity, policy disagreements, the impact of radical right parties, and local party competition. Alexander is passionate about quantitative and computational methods and tries to combine observational and experimental data. He employs a wide variety of techniques, including regressions, quasi-experimental methods, and computational text-as-data approaches.

Florian Holl is a student assistant at PARTISAN and is a Master’s student of Political Science at the University of Vienna.