Nicolai Berk
Portrait
Nicolai Berk is a PhD candidate at the Research Training Group "The Dynamics of Demography, Democratic Processes and Public Policy" (DYNAMICS), jointly organised by the Hertie School of Governance and the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He is supervised by Thomas Meyer.
Before joining Dynamics, Nicolai obtained a BA from the University of Vienna, where he also contributed to the Austrian election study (AUTNES) as a research assistant under the guidance of Univ.-Prof. Markus Wagner, PhD. He spent a semester at the Australian National University in Canberra and interned at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Funded by the German Academic Exchange Service, he pursued his MSc in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, focusing on electoral competition and automated text analysis. There, he also worked as a research assistant to Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Gijs Schumacher and participated in the Hot Politics Lab.
Nicolai is broadly interested in questions of political competition, public opinion and political rhetoric in Western Democracies. More concretely, he combines text analysis with econometric methods to study how political parties shape the political discourse. His special interest lies in the effects of radical right rhetoric.