Luis Sattelmayer
Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science, University of Innsbruck
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, working on the Group Appeals in Electoral and Parliamentary Debates (GAEPD) project. Previously, I received my PhD from the Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) at Sciences Po Paris.
In my research, I focus on party competition and political conflict in Western Europe, with a special emphasis on the role of party communication, party positions, and issue salience in shaping voter behavior and the fortunes of political parties. In my dissertation I explored the decline of former mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right, analyzing how their strategies and communication, especially towards the far-right and the issue of immigration, have influenced their electoral support in recent years.
Together with the wonderful Malo Jan, I develop PartySOME, a dataset and website on political parties’ social media activity and the political issues they communicate about. The dataset combines a large, harmonized corpus of official party posts from 38 countries with a classification of those posts into standardized policy issues; the website, partysome.org, lets researchers and the broader public explore what parties talk about on social media.
My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, West European Politics, and Party Politics.
Methodologically, I am very geeky about computational methods, which I use to collect and analyze large-scale text and visual data from all sorts of public and political actors, including parties and politicians, individuals, and media outlets. I am especially interested in finding new ways to measure social science concepts in large data sources, such as social media platforms, as well as traditional media like newspapers and TV broadcasts.
During my time as a doctoral candidate, I also held visiting positions at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) and the Centre Marc Bloch. I have also had the opportunity to teach various courses at Sciences Po, both substantive and methodological, for Bachelor’s and Master’s students, as well as at the PhD level in political science and sociology. You can find more information about my teaching here.