Rebecca C. Kittel

Welcome to my website! I am a Post Doctoral Researcher at Free University Berlin, Germany and Guest Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), Germany. I am currently working in the ERC-funded project LOOPS - The Logistics of Popular Uprisings in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes.

Before, I was a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. My research focuses on elite communication strategies and their effect on voters. To trace party positions and politicians’ language style, I applied a series of computational text analysis tools including machine learning and dictionaries with a strong emphasis on populist communication strategies.

To test the causal effect of language patterns on participation and voting behaviour, I am employing different survey experiments. Further, I analyse how communication styles, e.g. language complexity or emotions can mobilize people to protest. During my PhD, I was also visiting researcher at the NYU Wilf Family Department of Politics.

My research interest lies in the fields of comparative politics, social movement studies and political communication with a focus on computational social science methods and survey experiments.