Welcome.

About Dani Sandu

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Fribourg, where I coordinate the political-identity work package of the SNSF project Liberal Democratic Commitment in Europe, and a guest researcher at the University of Basel. I received my PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in 2023, supervised by Elias Dinas.

I study how political identities form, consolidate or dissipate, especially among the people who care most about politics, such as party activists, strong partisans and mobilized voters. Most of my designs use real events as treatments (an election, a political assassination, a media investigation, a party’s own campaign messages), and I build the data with partners, including a long collaboration with a Romanian party.

I study political behaviour, democratic commitment and the rise of the radical right.

My work is published in Comparative Political Studies (2022, 2025). My job market paper, Partisans at the Polls (with Costin Ciobanu), asks whether monitoring elections makes partisans more satisfied with democracy.

I am also finishing a book manuscript, based on my dissertation, on how East and West German history textbooks taught the same past.