Tarik Abou-Chadi is an internationally leading scholar on political parties and electoral behavior. His research focuses on the transformation of party politics in Western Europe and has especially contributed to a better understanding of the rise of radical right and Green parties as well as the electoral crisis of social democracy. His work has been published in many of the leading journals of the discipline such as the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and World Politics.
Abou-Chadi has written articles for the Washington Post, the Observer and the Guardian as well as several policy briefs and reports on the electoral crisis of social democratic parties for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. He has been an invited speaker at the European Parliament, at the LSE’s Ralph Miliband Programme and at several workshops on the future of social democracy in multiple European countries. In 2022, he was awarded the inaugural Henrik Enderlein Prize (together with Stefanie Stantcheva, Harvard University) for excellence in the social sciences – awarded by the German and French government for an outstanding researcher in the social sciences under the age of 40 whose work contributes to the future of Europe.
As an Einstein BUA/Oxford Visiting Fellow, Professor Abou-Chadi will conduct research on trade-offs in European politics. In a multi-issue and multi-party space where parties have to form new electoral alliances, the idea of trade-offs has become commonplace in how researchers think about dynamics of political competition. Simply put, if a party appeals to one electoral group, it might alienate another one. In his research project, Tarik Abou-Chadi aims to close gaps of political science and electoral research by conceptualising and analysing a new typology of voters and their availability to programmatic competition. It will create and test a typology of voters that includes party loyalists, performance voters and those who are potentials for programmatic competition. The project will then analyse parties’ programmatic appeals in the field of progressive politics. What groups can social democratic, green and radical left parties appeal to with different programmatic profiles? The project will combine observational data with a conjoint experiment that lets people choose between stylized party programs and will be fielded in Germany, Spain, Sweden and the UK.