I am Professor of Comparative Austrian Politics at the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Salzburg, which I have chaired from 2009 to 2024. Previously, I had been a faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh (1994-2009) where I have remained an affiliate of the Center of European Studies. I received my PhD from Michigan State University in 1994 and my MA from Virginia Tech in 1987. Since 2014 I teach regularly at the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, China.

My main research interests are centered on comparative populism, Euroscepticism, political parties, the radical right and democracy. My research has appeared in journals such as  The European Journal of Political Research, The Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics, and Democratization among many others. My book publications in English include Understanding Populist Organization: The West European Radical Right (Palgrave 2016), The People and the Nation: Populism and Ethno-Territorial Politics in Europe (Routledge 2019), Political Populism: Handbook of Concepts, Questions and Strategies of Research (Nomos 2021), and, most recently, Politicizing Islam in Austria: The Far-Right Impact in the Twenty-First Century (Rutgers‘ University Press 2024).

Several grants have supported my research, including a Marie Curie fellowship and an EU Horizon 2020 grant titled Populism and Civic Engagement (PaCE). More recently, I have become interested in exploring the relationship between populism and conspiracy theories. Thus, funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has allowed me to launch a new project on conspiracy theories and conspiracy mentality. Using surveys and survey experiments in select European countries, we investigate people’s susceptibility to conspiracy narratives and try to assess the role of political factors in explaining conspiracy thinking.

My work has been recognized by different prizes such as in 2017 the Austrian Science Prize (“Wissenschaftspreis”) by the Lupac Foundation of the Austrian Parliament.