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Constitutional Power-Sharing Dataset 2.1, country-averages (1945-2018)

I am a Postdoc in the ETH Fellows Program, based at the International Conflict Research Group at ETH Zurich. I obtained my PhD from University College London in 2020 (see description here). In 2021, my dissertation was awarded the ECPR Jean Blondel Prize (best dissertation in politics). I also hold an MA degree in Comparative and International Studies from ETH Zurich and a BSc degree in Geography and Chinese from University of Zurich (see here for my complete CV). A portrait of me and my work has previously appeared on ETH News.

In my research, I focus on the trade-offs entailed by attempts to institutionalize peace in ethnically divided places. Empirically, my work concentrates on governmental power-sharing and territorial autonomy. I am especially interested in their consequences for inter-ethnic peace and democracy. Much of my work connects the literature on ethnic conflict with social psychology. This enables me to derive novel expectations on how power-sharing affects mass attitudes and test them in multi-level set-ups using international surveys. In my current Postdoc project at ETH Zurich, I extend this line of research by investigating how and why members of ethno-cultural majorities mobilize against minority accommodation. I predominantly rely on quantitative methods, but seek to combine this with process tracing for typical cases, enabling me to probe my hypothesized causal mechanisms further. I often rely on comparative approaches that exploit sub-national variation, in particular at the levels of ethnic groups, the individuals of which they are composed, and the territories they inhabit.

My research has given me extensive experience with the collection of comparative global data. As part of my Ph.D. project, I have collected the Constitutional Power-Sharing Dataset, which consists of disaggregated and geo-coded data from constitutions and autonomy statutes for more than 180 countries for the period of 1945-2018. Additionally, I have also collected geo-spatial data on administrative territorial units for the same set of countries and time period and created a new procedure enabling the systematic mapping of ethnically-differentiated mass attitudes across the globe since 1980 based on existing surveys. I have also contributed to the collection of several other large datasets, including the Democracy Barometer (where I coordinated the 2018 update) and various components of the Ethnic Power Relations dataset, for which I coded a number of countries.

I have taught introductory courses on international relations, political economy, political science in general, and political violence. I have further assisted in teaching classes on statistics and economic geography.


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