PhD Candidate

Jakob Kasper is a third-year PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), affiliated with the MSCA doctoral network ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence and Democracy’ and the HotPoliticsLab. His work centers on affective polarization. He investigates how it can be measured in multi-party systems by focusing on subsets of large and ideologically diverse political groups. In addition, he aims to bridge research on affective polarization in political science with psychological theories of affect by developing new theoretical frameworks and measurement approaches that better capture the ‘affective’ nature of polarization. Finally, he studies how affective polarization develops during adolescence to better understand its origins and address concerns about increasing polarization among younger generations.

Before joining ASCoR, Jakob received a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and spent one year as a graduate exchange student at Cornell University (USA).

Keywords: affective polarization