Dr. Fabian Habersack

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I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, specializing in comparative politics, political representation, and the study of populism in Europe. My research examines how globalization and social change shape political conflict, how far-right populism challenges liberal democracies, and how political parties and citizens respond to these developments.

My Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg, awarded with distinction, investigated how established political parties respond to the success of far-right populists, balancing strategic responsiveness to shifting voter demands with the preservation of ideological commitments and long-term programmatic goals. Building on this, my postdoctoral work shifts the perspective to the citizen level, examining the social, psychological, and contextual drivers of populist and extremist attitudes and how citizens evaluate democratic representation and political responsibility in an era of polarization and crisis. This research integrates survey experiments, qualitative content analysis, and advanced computational approaches, including natural language processing and automated analyses of political communication and elite behavior. My ERC Starting Grant proposal further develops this agenda by theorizing and empirically analyzing political responsibility as a relational and discursive dimension of democratic politics. My findings have been published in leading journals, including the British Journal of Political Science (forthcoming), European Journal of Political Research, Government and Opposition, Party Politics, and Political Studies.

I am committed to innovative and inclusive teaching, offering courses on populism, political representation, Austrian and European politics, quantitative methods, programming, and computational text analysis at the University of Innsbruck and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. I also regularly supervise and mentor undergraduate and graduate students.

Beyond research and teaching, I serve as an elected board member of the Austrian Political Science Association (ÖGPW) and as a member of the editorial board of Politics and Governance.

For more details, see publications and current research.