Rebecca C. Kittel

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

I obtained my PhD 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.