Biography

Andres Reiljan defended his PhD at the EUI (Department of Political and Social Sciences) in 2021. From 2021 to 2023 he conducted his research at the University of Tartu as a postdoctoral fellow, managing a project that was funded by a personal grant from the Estonian Research Council.

His main fields of expertise are comparative politics and political behaviour. Both his PhD and postdoctoral project focused on the concept of affective polarization, broadly defined as the mutual antipathy between different political camps in society.

During his Max Weber Fellowship, Andres will continue his work on affective polarization in contemporary democracies, focusing predominantly on two research directions.
First, Andres is working on several paper projects with a broader aim of improving our knowledge about the origins of affective polarization. The papers focus on far right populism, regional inequalities and corruption as the potential drivers of political hostility.

The second research direction concerns potential ways of reducing affective polarization among voters. Within the framework of EUROHUB2024 project, Andres co-led the development of a pan-European voting advice application EU&I which was also used to conduct a large-scale experiment to test a potential intervention for mitigating partisan hostility.

Andres has taught three different master’s level courses at the University of Tartu and the University of Lucerne.

He has also supervised five master’s theses on topics ranging from political behaviour to education policy.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

• Transnational Democracy in the 21st century
• Corruption and affective polarisation: How party-level corruption perceptions drive partisan affect
• European elections mobilisation and participation hub 2024 (EUROHUB24)

Mentor

• Ellen Margaretha Immergut

Mentor

• Simon Hix

Recent research output

• TORCAL, Mariano; REILJAN, Andres; ZANOTTI, Lisa (2023), Affective polarization in comparative perspective, Article
• BETTARELLI, Luca; REILJAN, Andres; VAN HAUTE, Emilie (2023), A regional perspective to the study of affective polarization, Article
• REILJAN, Andres; GARZIA, Diego; FERREIRA DA SILVA, Frederico; TRECHSEL, Alexander H. (2023), Patterns of affective polarization toward parties and leaders across the democratic world, Article
• REILJAN, Andres; CICCHI, Lorenzo; GARZIA, Diego; FERREIRA DA SILVA, Frederico; TRECHSEL, Alexander H. (2023), Party placement in the void : the European political space in 10 years of cross-national voting advice applications, Working Paper
• FERREIRA DA SILVA, Frederico; REILJAN, Andres; CICCHI, Lorenzo; TRECHSEL, Alexander H.; GARZIA, Diego (2023), Three sides of the same coin? : comparing party positions in VAAs, expert surveys and manifesto data, Article
• REILJAN, Andres (2021), Affective polarization in multiparty systems : conceptualization, measurement and foundations, Thesis