At present I am working primarily on the competition between political parties in multinational democracies and on the shaping of integration policies in the minority regions of South Tyrol and Catalonia. In the future I will take up the topic of democratic innovation at the local level and the political mobilization of social lines of conflict during the parliamentarization of the Habsburg Empire.

My previous research focus lay on institutional design in ethnically divided societies and the strategic behavior of ethnical parties in political competition.

From a methodological standpoint I place particular value on theoretically clearly specified mechanistic causal explanations of social phenomena. I am, therefore, convinced that social-scientific research should combine quantitative methods for the discovery of systematic relationships with qualitative methods for the detailed analysis of causal processes, and I attempt to do justice to this ideal in my research projects.