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. Local Unemployment in Formative Years and Anti-Immigration Attitudes in Adulthood. Presented at EPSA 2025. Draft available upon request. [Abstract]
   
   Does early-life exposure to economic uncertainty fuel a persistent fear of economic decline, increasing anti-immigration attitudes in adulthood? While economic hardship is often assumed to drive opposition to immigration, empirical studies have found only modest and inconsistent effects of both recessions and individual economic conditions on anti-immigration attitudes. I test one possible explanation for this puzzle: that exposure to labor market risk during adolescence fosters a persistent sensitivity to economic risk, heightening susceptibility to anti-immigration narratives in adulthood. I build on political socialization research, which highlights formative years as a critical period for the formation of stable, long-term political attitudes. Leveraging data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP, 1993–2023) linked to district-level historical employment data, I show that growing up in districts with higher unemployment rates between ages 14 and 18 is associated with higher levels of concern about immigration later in life. This relationship holds across model specifications and persists in a two-step fixed effects estimation that isolates stable individual predispositions. By linking formative economic experiences with adult political outcomes, this study moves beyond individual current economic conditions to explain anti-immigration attitudes. As such, it has implications for research on political behavior and the long-term political impact of economic crises.

2. Who Knows Where They Stand? A Heteroskedastic Regression Approach to Objective-Subjective Class Misalignment (with Jan Menzner). [Abstract]
   
   Understanding how individuals perceive their social class is central to political behavior research, especially as subjective and objective class indicators often diverge. This research note examines the extent and structure of that divergence using novel survey data from Germany. We first show that standard objective indicators – education, income, and occupational prestige – predict subjective class identification only imprecisely and with systematic variation. To investigate this variation, we develop and apply a custom heteroskedastic maximum likelihood estimator that captures subgroup differences in predictive precision and corrects for violations of the homoskedasticity assumption in conventional models. Results indicate that objective class measures align more closely with subjective perceptions among the highly educated and those who perceive life as generally fair. Network heterogeneity, by contrast, does not appear to shape this relationship. Substantively, these findings underscore that class awareness may be unevenly distributed across society and highlight the need for caution when using subjective or objective class as interchangeable proxies in political science research. The accompanying R script is intended to facilitate the application of heteroskedastic regression in related 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.