Christoffer Hentzer Dausgaard

I study the behavior and psychology of voters focusing on the role of group identities and the economy. When and why do voters act on the basis of in-group interests? And how do voters make sense of national economic developments politically? To examine these questions, I draw on a combination of experiments and causal inference designs for observational data.

In two current working papers, I examine how group psychology shapes voters’ reactions to economic growth and targeted policies beyond sociotropic and egotropic voting. In another working paper, with Frederik Hjorth, we examine how voters update perceptions of group-party linkages in response to political rhetoric, using a trained language model to classify party elite communication over three decades. I’m also currently working on a project with Rune Stubager and Mike Lewis-Beck on the role of out-group sympathies for vote choice.

I also do work on classical topics in economic voting. In a current working paper, I apply policy microsimulation models to survey panel data to examine whether voters distinguish political from non-political changes in their personal welfare when assessing incumbent performance. In a recent book chapter, with Martin Vinæs Larsen, we use a combination of experiments and shift-share instrumental variables to isolate the effects of rising energy prices and the government’s ‘Heat Check’ benefit policy on the 2022 Danish Parliamentary Election.

My PhD project is supervised by Frederik Hjorth (main supervisor) and Peter Thisted Dinesen (co-supervisor). 

• Political behaviour and opinion formation
• Social identity and group belonging
• Political psychology and sociology
• Quantitative methods
• Quasi-experimental designs
• Causal inference with observational data
• Graphical causal models

I've taught the compulsory Methods 2 and Methods 3 courses for undergraduate Political Science students, which cover, among other things, causal inference and quasi-experimental designs. 

Office Hours: Tuesday 11 - 12