Prof. Thomas Gschwend, PhD


University of Mannheim

School of Social Sciences
A5, 6 – Building B   |  68159 Mannheim

Email: gschwend [at] ccdb.eu
Phone: +49 (0) 621 – 181 – 2087
www.sowi.uni-mannheim.de/gschwend/

 

I am a Professor for Political Science, Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at the School of Social Sciences and a project director at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES), University of Mannheim. My substantive research focuses on electoral behavior, public opinion and comparative politics. I am interested in the processes by which electoral institutions pre-structure an individual’s decision-making process and its consequences for voters, party strategies and election outcomes. My current work draws on research in political behavior and electoral systems in comparative perspective in order to provide a micro-theory of how actors facing institutional constraints form expectations about the consequences of their behavior. Recent projects expand this idea also to areas such as legislative politics and empirical legal studies. I am currently also involved in a forecasting project, Zweitstimme.org, to predict the outcome of federal elections.