Niklas Donth

Niklas Donth is a Lecturer and PhD student in Political Science at the University of Stuttgart, affiliated with the Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Political Systems and Political Sociology. Since December 2023, he has served as an Academic Associate at the university while completing his doctoral research.

His research focuses on how individuals form political preferences, attitudes, and opinions, with particular interest in the strategic intersections between party strategies and voting behavior. His doctoral project examines the role of left-authoritarian voters in the electoral contest between social democracy and the populist radical right in Europe. Methodologically, he specializes in quantitative empirical applications of Bayesian statistics, causal machine learning, and modern causal analysis approaches.

Dr. Donth teaches courses including Parties in Competition, Multivariate Data Analysis with R, and Populism and Radicalism in Germany. His technical expertise is evident in his GitHub contributions to European Social Survey (ESS) data analysis tools and party linking projects, demonstrating his commitment to advancing methodological approaches in political science research.

He holds a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Mannheim (2021-2023) and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and Psychology from Heidelberg University (2017-2021). His methodological training includes multiple specialized workshops from GESIS on causal mediation analysis, multiverse analysis, and comparative social research with multi-group SEM.