Political Science

Arndt Leininger has been Professor of Political Science, especially Methods, at Universität Hamburg since 2026. His research is in political behavior and applied quantitative methods, covering direct democracy, polarization, right-wing populism, and turnout, among others. His work has been published in leading journals including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, and West European Politics. He leads a DFG Emmy Noether Research Group on "Polarization through and in referendums" and holds an ERC Starting Grant for his project on "Residential mobility and electoral realignment in established democracies (RESPOL)."

Peter Niesen has been Professor of Political Theory at Universität Hamburg since 2013. Niesen has worked on Kant, Bentham, and Habermas and currently directs a DFG funded project on constituent power beyond the state. His work has been published in Constellations, Journal of International Political Theory and the Journal of Common Market Studies. Niesen is a former founding member of the Cluster of Excellence „Formation of Normative Orders“. Since 2017, he has been speaker of the German Association for Political Theory.

Kai-Uwe Schnapp has been Professor of Political Science, especially Research Methodology at Universität Hamburg since 2008. His research covers a wide range of issues from methodological topics to questions of needs based justice on to comparative research in parliaments and public administration. He published his research in various journals, edited volumes and monographies. He is member of the editorial board of the Politische Vierteljahresschrift (German Political Science Review).

Vera Troeger is Professor of Comparative Political Science at Universität Hamburg. Currently she serves as president of the European Political Science Association. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the flagship journal of the EPSA – Political Science Research and Methods, and she will take over as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Politics, one of the top 3 journals in Political Science, in 2020. Her research interests lie at the intersection between international and comparative political economy, labour economics, as well as applied quantitative data analysis and political methodology.