Prof. Dr. Sebastian Haunss

1. March 2025
by shaunss
0 comments

Protest Types and Protester Profiles: Testing Meso−Micro-Associations Between Event Characteristics and Participant Attitudes

Can we infer individual characteristics of protest participants by examining the demonstrations they go to? Public debate and academic literature both tend to make such inferences from the meso- to the micro-level. This article tests whether this practice is empirically warranted.

Continue Reading →

19. July 2024
by shaunss
0 comments

Local protest event analysis: providing a more comprehensive picture?

In exploring protest dynamics, Protest Event Analysis (PEA) has proven an indispensable analytic tool. Despite various improvements, PEA faces continuous challenges, notably the reproduction of media-specific selection biases. This research note aims to contribute to the literature seeking to mitigate these issues by exploring the potential of PEA based on local newspaper data, which tend to be less selective in their protest reporting.

Continue Reading →

19. July 2024
by shaunss
0 comments

Automatic Analysis of Political Debates and Manifestos: Successes and Challenges


The opinions of political actors (e.g., politicians, parties, organizations) expressed through claims are the core elements of political debates and decision-making. Political actors communicate through different channels: parties publish manifestos for major elections, while individual actors make statements on a day-to-day basis as reflected in the media. These two channels offer different approaches for analysis: Manifestos, on the one hand, are useful to characterize the parties’ positions at a global ideological level over time. In contrast, individual statements can be collected to analyze debates in particular policy domains on a fine-grained level, in terms of individual actors and claims. In this article, we summarize a series of studies we have carried out.

Continue Reading →

16. December 2022
by shaunss
0 comments

Multimodal mechanisms of political discourse dynamics and the case of Germany’s nuclear energy phase-out

The 2011 policy pivot of the German government, from extending nuclear power plants terms to securing their shutdown for 2022, cannot be explained without looking at how the German political discourse network shifted in the months following Fukushima. This paper seeks to model and identify mechanisms that help explain how the two-mode network of political actors’ support for claims developed.

Continue Reading →

8. December 2021
by shaunss
0 comments

Taking to the Streets in Germany

Disenchanted and Confident Critics in Mass Demonstrations

This paper analyses the socio-demographic attributes and political attitudes of protesters in Germany. In doing so, the paper studies participation at demonstrations, one of the key forms of non-electoral political participation in Germany and a central political arena in which to negotiate political and cultural conflicts.

Continue Reading →

26. November 2021
by shaunss
0 comments

The Emergence of Healthcare Systems

Some sort of medical infrastructure has existed in all modern states and dependent territories. However, healthcare systems that provide legal entitlements to medical care at least for specific groups of the population, and that regulate access to and provision of healthcare on a national level only came into existence at the end of the nineteenth century.

Continue Reading →