Kontakt
Raum: GFG 04-328
Mail: kwalz@uni-mainz.de
Sprechstunde: nach Vereinbarung
CV
Seit 04/2024 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Politikwissenschaft an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
04/2021-03/2024 Promotionsstipendiat des Mini-Graduiertenkollegs Resilient Institutions an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
04/2018-07/2020 Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft am Institut für Politikwissenschaft und Soziologie an der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
2017-2020 M.A. Political and Social Sciences an der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
2012-2016 B.A. Political and Social Studies an der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
Forschungsinteressen
- Demokratische Erosion und Resilienz
- Politische Institutionen
- Demokratietheorie
- Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft
Dissertationsprojekt: Anti-Pluralists, Democratic Erosion, and the Breakdown Resilience of Democratic Regimes
Democracy is massively under pressure as a “third wave of autocratization” (Lührmann & Lindberg 2019) is still rolling worldwide. Focussing contemporary Episodes of Autocratization, Scholars lately postulated the emergence of a new dominant pattern of how Democracies decay and die. According to their findings, democratic regimes nowadays rarely collapse within short periods but seem to die slowly in gradual processes eroding fundamental democratic institutions and principles more often. There is evidence, that in many cases, democratic erosion is mainly driven by anti-pluralist actors who got voted into office and therefore, feature a minimum degree of democratic legitimacy. In most cases, Anti-Pluralists successfully change the rules of the game and transform the democratic system into an autocratic one. Only in extremely rare cases do they fail, and Democracy survives. This study examines under which circumstances the ‘Defenders of Democracy’ successfully stop democratic erosion, and what we can learn from this about the “breakdown resilience” (Boese et al. 2021) of democratic regimes.
Lehre
- Basisseminar Politische Theorie (SoSe 2024)
- Aufbauseminar Theorie und Empirie demokratischer Erosion (WS 2022/23)