Rebecca Kittel

Rebecca Kittel is a Post Doctoral Researcher at the Free University of Berlin within the Institute for East European Studies and a Visiting Researcher at the WZB Center for Civil Society Research. Her primary research focuses on the logistics of protest camps in competitive authoritarian regimes through the ERC-funded LOOPS project, and she contributes to the "Forging Solidarity" project analyzing political explanations of solidarity in social policies.

Her educational background includes:

• PhD in Political Science (2023) from the European University Institute, Florence
• MA in Political Science (2019) from the University of Cologne
• BSc in Social Sciences (2016) from the University of Cologne

Dr. Kittel's research bridges comparative politics and political communication through computational social science methodologies. She specializes in text-as-data analysis to examine populism, protest behavior, and elite communication strategies, employing machine learning and dictionary-based approaches to trace language positioning in political discourse. Her experimental work tests causal effects of rhetorical patterns on voter behavior, with significant focus on authoritarian contexts and populist actors.

Her scientific recognition includes:

• ERC Starting Grant (2023) for "The Logistics of Popular Uprisings in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes" (LOOPS)

As principal investigator of the ERC project, Dr. Kittel leads research on protest camp infrastructure in authoritarian settings while contributing experimental design expertise to the "Forging Solidarity" project. Her grant portfolio demonstrates capacity to secure competitive European funding for interdisciplinary political science research.

She actively collaborates within the LOOPS project team building comparative datasets on protest logistics and the "Forging Solidarity" consortium analyzing health care and socio-ecological policy debates. These teams integrate political science, computational linguistics, and experimental design to decode how political explanations shape public opinion and collective action.