Franziska Veit

I am a PhD candidate with the DYNAMICS Research Training Group and the Chair of Political Sociology and Social Policy at Humboldt University of Berlin. My research lies at the intersection of political economy and political sociology. Specifically, I study how formative experiences of economic risk shape political attitudes throughout the life course.

You can find my CV here.

Feel free to get in touch via Bluesky or LinkedIn or send me an email if you’d like to talk research.

Inheriting Uncertainty? Intergenerational Perspectives on Economic Risk and Political Attitudes [Description]

1. Birthplaces That Don’t Matter? How Early-Life Exposure to Local Unemployment Shapes Immigration Attitudes. Presented at EPSA 2025. Draft available upon request. [Abstract]
   
   Theories of globalization and labor market risk portray economic change as a key driver of nativism. Yet individuals’ current economic conditions only weakly predict their immigration attitudes. I argue that the missing link is formative exposure. Experiencing economic insecurity during adolescence fosters persistent sensitivity to economic risk, making individuals more susceptible to threat-based immigration narratives. Building on political socialization research that identifies adolescence as a critical period for attitude formation, I test this argument using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1993–2023) linked to district-level historical employment data. The results show that individuals who grew up in districts with higher unemployment express stronger concern about immigration in adulthood. By linking formative economic experiences to adult political outcomes, this study identifies a novel economic-socialization pathway to explain immigration attitudes. It contributes to understanding how economic uncertainty is transmitted across generations and how formative experiences shape the foundations of democratic politics.

2. Uncovering Uneven Class Awareness: A Heteroskedastic Regression Approach to Subjective Class Placement (with Jan Menzner). [Abstract]
   
   Understanding how individuals perceive their social class is central to political behavior research, yet subjective and objective indicators often diverge. Using German survey data, we examine the structure of that divergence by explicitly modeling differences in the error variance when predicting subjective class perceptions with three standard objective class indicators -- education, income, and occupational prestige. Employing a heteroskedastic maximum likelihood estimator, we show that these objective class markers predict subjective class more precisely among individuals scoring highly on them and those satisfied with their position in life. Conversely, citizens from objectively lower classes have more dispersed subjective perceptions. This carries broad implications for research on, for example, class awareness, class mobility, and class-based appeals. Moreover, the analysis cautions against treating subjective and objective class as interchangeable and illustrates the usefulness of heteroskedastic regression, which can be easily adopted to other empirical settings.

3. Programmatic Trade-Offs of Green Parties in Difficult Times (with Hanna Schwander and Reto Mitteregger). [Abstract]
   
   Originally considered a single-issue party by some, green parties have emerged as the most successful party family within the group of “new left” parties in many European countries. With the electoral decline of social democracy and the salience of climate change, their electoral base has grown and become more diverse. In addition, green parties are potentially torn between their core issue, climate change, and their broader profile as a progressive left party. To this day, we know little about the extent to which green parties face saliency trade-offs versus zero-sum trade-offs in their programmatic strategies which might be different from those of other parties. Existing research on programmatic trade-offs for political parties has predominantly focused on mainstream parties (social democratic and conservative parties), with the recent innovation of differentiation between saliency trade-offs and zero-sum trade-offs. Saliency trade-offs occur when an issue is important for one voter group but not another, allowing parties to form positive-sum strategies. Zero-sum trade-offs, in contrast, create immediate strategic dilemmas when two voter groups prioritize conflicting policy positions. So far, however, programmatic trade-offs have not been examined for green parties, despite these parties' growing electoral prominence. The paper focuses on the case of Germany, where the Green party had been particularly successful. It empirically analyzes these questions by relying on a conjoint experiment conducted in Germany in 2025 (n=2500), where respondents were prompted with different green party programs. The study and its findings have broad implications as they help us understand the electoral potential and challenges of new left competitors in the increasingly fragmented party systems of Western Europe.