Alexander Held

Alexander is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of British Columbia. His research is about the phenomenon of citizen political alienation in advanced industrialized democracies, with a focus on the political disengagement by mainly poor and young voters and the turn to radical alternatives such as far-right populist parties. Alexander is particularly interested in the use of state-of-the-art quantitative methods, especially experiments and quasi-experiments, for program and policy evaluation. In his dissertation he uses these methods to evaluate the effectiveness of policies and arguments that are aimed at increasing voter turnout and reducing support for populist parties and politicians. Alexander is a past program scholar and teaching assistant of the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds Staatsexamen’s degrees in Political Science, French and English from Heidelberg University, Germany.