Professor Klüver’s research explores political behavior within democracies, with a specific focus on the dynamics between interest groups, political parties, voters, and coalition governments.
Abstract from the speaker:
Democracies across the world have come under increasing pressure in recent years, most visibly through rising electoral support for far-right parties as a central manifestation of democratic backsliding. While a large literature has focused on explaining these developments, we know far less about how democracies can be strengthened in practice. This book advances an informational theory of democratic backsliding that highlights the overlooked role of misperceptions. It argues that democratic erosion is driven not only by objective economic or cultural grievances, but by systematically distorted perceptions of societal problems, group-based disadvantage, and political unresponsiveness—distortions that far-right parties actively cultivate and that are amplified by social media environments rewarding emotional and polarizing narratives. Moving beyond diagnosis, the book asks a central question: what works to strengthen democratic resilience and contain far-right support? Drawing on original survey experiments, online field experiments, and large-scale field interventions, it evaluates three classes of corrective strategies: preventive interventions, informational corrections and experiential corrections. The findings demonstrate that democratic backsliding is not inevitable: correcting misperceptions offers a comparatively low-cost, scalable, and politically feasible strategy to reduce far-right support and strengthen democratic resilience.
About the speaker:
Heike Klüver is a Full professor and Chair of Comparative Political Behavior at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Director of the Humboldt Governance Lab and Spokesperson of the DFG Research Training Group DYNAMICS. She previously held positions as Full professor and Chair of Comparative Politics at the University of Hamburg, as Professor of Empirical Political Science at the University of Bamberg, as Junior Professor at the University of Konstanz and as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. Heike Klüver received her Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim.
Bring your own lunch bag! Light pastries and drinks will be available in case you forget to bring it.
The Data Science Brown Bag Series is an informal and interactive gathering where participants bring their own brown bag lunch and engage in discussions on research and insights the field of data and computational social science (light pastries and drinks will be available if you forget your lunch bag!).
The series provides a platform for data enthusiasts, researchers, and practitioners to share their experiences, best practices, and emerging methodologies and research in using data science to analyze and understand social and political phenomena. The brown bag talk series is for anyone interested in data science and social science to network, learn, and share ideas in a casual and friendly setting.
