Anna Adendorf

Year: 2017

Center: Social Sciences

Supervisor: Thomas Gschwend

Anna Adendorf holds a Bachelor and Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Mannheim, with a stay abroad at University of Essex, UK. During her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Chair of Political Science III (Prof. Marc Debus, Comparative Government) as well as the Department of Government at the University of Essex.

Her research interests focus on party competition, especially on how political parties communicate their positions and goals to the electorate. Furthermore, she is interested in how parties and individual candidates position themselves relative to each other and over time and across space. In addition to party competition, she is fascinated by legislative behavior, which is why in her Master's thesis, she examined how MEPs deal with potentially conflicting pressures from three principals – their national party, their European party group, and their electorate – and how they manage to balance these cross-pressures in their legislative speeches. When it comes to methods, she is particularly interested in quantitative text analysis and how it can help to understand written documents, such as election manifestos, in a comparative manner.