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 under the supervision of Hanna Schwander. I will be a Junior Visiting Scholar at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, from October to December 2026, and have previously visited the University of Milan.

My research sits at the intersection of political economy and political sociology, broadly concerned with how structural economic change and labor market crises shape political attitudes and behavior in post-industrial democracies. Specifically, I study how these changes are experienced and transmitted at the individual level — for example, how early-life exposure to unemployment or rapid deindustrialization shapes economic perceptions and political behavior over 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.

1. Birthplaces That Don’t Matter? How Early-Life Exposure to Local Unemployment Shapes Immigration Attitudes. Presented at EPSA 2025. [Working Paper] [Abstract]
   
   Theories of globalization and labor market risk portray economic insecurity 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 to economic insecurity, which fosters a persistent sensitivity to economic risk and makes 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. Growing Up in Deindustrializing Britain: Economic Trauma and Support for Brexit. Presented at EPSS 2026. [Abstract]
   
   A large literature shows how globalization and economic decline have produced “left-behind” regions characterized by persistent political discontent. Less is known about why the political effects of economic shocks endure across cohorts and sometimes long after the underlying economic changes have occurred. Existing explanations focus on regional persistence but provide limited micro-level accounts of how these effects are transmitted across individuals and cohorts. I argue that exposure to rapid regional deindustrialization during formative years functions as a form of economic trauma, shaping individuals’ long-term perceptions of economic risk and decline, with persistent effects on political behavior in adulthood. I test this argument using retrospective data from Understanding Society – The UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS), combined with historical labor market data (1979-2000). Using a shift-share exposure design, I link respondents to national occupational decline, their father's occupation and local occupational concentration in their birthplace. Preliminary findings show that individuals more exposed to deindustrialization during formative years were significantly more likely to vote Leave in the 2016 EU Referendum as adults, and that these findings are explained more by place-based exposure than by household-level factors. This paper has implications for research on political behavior and the long-term political consequences of structural economic change.

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.

4. Echoes of the Picket Line: The 1984–1985 UK Miners’ Strike, Political Socialization, and Long-Term Political Behavior (with Charlotte Kuberka). [Abstract]
   
   The 1984–1985 United Kingdom coal miners’ strike is widely regarded as one of the biggest and most consequential industrial disputes in modern British history. Beyond its immediate economic and social effects, the strike is often described as a profoundly politicizing event. Building on research on political socialization and deindustrialization, we conceptualize the strike as a critical formative experience capable of shaping long-term political behavior. Leveraging an original dataset linking historical coal mine closures to local and national election outcomes, we employ a Differences-in-Differences design to estimate the long-term effects of strike-related closures on voting behavior in English constituencies between 1964 and 2020. We also use longitudinal BHPS and Understanding Society data to examine effects on political attitudes. The results have implications for how formative political experiences shape long-term political behavior, as well as the legacy effects of rapid deindustrialization and the political conflict it produced.

5. 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.

6. The Three Ds of Place: Density, Distance, Diversity and Cosmopolitan Attitudes in Germany (with Davide Luca and Neil Lee). [Abstract]
   
   Existing evidence points to a causal link between preadult exposure to place characteristics and later-in-life individual outlooks. In this paper we provide new theory of three key geographical dimensions which may shape ‘place effects’, namely density, distance, and diversity. We then test these in Germany using a Two-stage-least square estimator that allows us to control for individual sorting.