Christian Rauh

Christian Rauh is a Professor for the Politics of Multilevel Governance at the University of Potsdam since March 2023 and a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center since April 2012. He is affiliated with the Research Department Global Governance at WZB, where he previously served as Interim Director (2020). His academic journey includes a guest professorship at Freie Universität Berlin (2020) and foundational research roles at WZB since 2008.

His educational background features a Dr. rer. pol. summa cum laude from Freie Universität Berlin (2012) with an award-winning thesis on EU consumer policies, and an M.A. in Politics and Management from Universität Konstanz (2008) where his diploma thesis received national recognition. Early career experience includes editorial work for European Union Politics and teaching assistantships at Konstanz.

Rauh's research centers on the politicization of global governance through quantitative text analysis of political discourse. He investigates EU institutional dynamics, crisis communication, and supranational actor behavior using computational methods and large-scale text corpora. His work bridges theoretical frameworks from international relations with empirical innovations in political methodology, emphasizing data visualization and programming for text analysis.

Analysis of his publication trajectory (2016-2025) reveals consistent methodological evolution: from foundational work on EU bureaucracy toward advanced computational approaches examining crisis responses, social media, and longitudinal discourse patterns. His research increasingly integrates cross-national parliamentary speech datasets (ParlSpeech) with global governance analysis, demonstrating growing sophistication in handling multimodal political communication data.

His scientific recognition includes:

• ECPR Jean Blondel Prize (2013) for best doctoral thesis in politics
• VEUK e.V. Award (2009) for best diploma thesis in Politics and Management

Rauh leads significant research initiatives including the WZB-funded 'Politicization of European Integration' project (ongoing since 2011) and the European Commission-funded OPTED project (2020-2023) analyzing political texts across democracies. His grant portfolio demonstrates sustained institutional support for computational social science infrastructure development, particularly through ParlSpeech data repositories. While student supervision details aren't explicit in source materials, his professorship at Potsdam implies graduate mentorship responsibilities.

He operates within the WZB's Global Governance research ecosystem, collaborating with leading scholars like Michael Zürn and Pieter de Wilde. His GitHub presence (ChRauh) showcases methodological contributions including Twitter scraping tools and survey applications, reflecting his commitment to open science and reproducible research infrastructure.