I am a political scientist working in the fields of comparative political economy and sociology as well as European integration. In comparative political economy and sociology, I focus on questions such as inequality in political participation, interest representation by trade unions, party polarization, corporatism, welfare state development, austerity, liberalization, and redistribution. My research in European Studies focuses on the interaction between national welfare states and the logics and requirements of European integration. I am increasingly concerned about the links between rationality and citizens’ political awareness, democratic politics at the elite level, and public policy.

I am working as an associated researcher at the Department of Political Science at the University of Zurich. From 1993-2020, I served as a professor of comparative and European politics at the University of Bern.

I have organized several cross-national data sets spanning long time periods. The ‘Comparative Political Data Set’ (https://www.cpds-data.org/) and the ‘Liberalization Data Set’ (https://liberalization.org/) are among them.