Petra Schleiter

I am a Professor of Comparative Politics and a Fellow of St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. In addition, I am affiliated with University College London as a Fellow of the Constitution Unit.

For the academic year 2024-2025, I am based in Berlin as a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin), where I have visiting affiliations with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Hertie School.

Research

I currently lead the University of Oxford’s initiative to establish the Centre for Democratic Resilience, and my research projects focus on innovating democratic institutions, electoral participation, and the capacity of democratic societies to cohere in the context of diversity.

My expertise straddles three broad areas: comparative political institutions, political parties, and voter attitudes and behaviour. My work on comparative political institutions explores the effects of institutional innovation and fundamental institutional rules in developed democracies, such as mandatory voter ID, fixed and flexible election timing, confidence procedures, rules of government formation and termination, parliamentary prorogation, constitutional change, and the powers of executive presidents. I examine how these rules affect voters, and how leaders use them to exercise power, advance policy, and achieve re-election.

The second area of my expertise is party political competition. Party competition affects how clearly responsibility can be attributed to incumbents and how easy it is to hold them to account. This has consequences for a range of outcomes, including parties' electoral success, their responsiveness to voters, and governmental corruption. Party competition also shapes major cross-national waves of policy diffusion and programmatic re-orientation, such as the turn to third-way Social Democracy, economic neo-liberalism, and the backlash against foreign populist incumbents. My work has examined all of these outcomes.

My third area of expertise is voter attitudes and behaviour, where my work explores the voter-level mechanisms that shape electoral participation, support for incumbents, and the effectiveness of mainstream politicians’ interventions to counter anti-democratic appeals and associated attitudes such as hostility to immigrants and gender-stereotypes.

My research has been published in PLOS One, the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, World Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Political Science Research and Methods, International Studies Quarterly, Party Politics, European Journal of Political Research and elsewhere.