Dr. Denis Cohen

I am a Senior Research Fellow in the Data and Methods Unit at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim. I am also the lead organiser of the MZES Social Science Data Lab as well as co-founder and co-editor of the blog Methods Bites, where I regularly contribute tutorials on research methods and social data science.

I study context-dependent explanations of political preferences and voting behaviour, the drivers and outcomes of party competition in multiparty democracies, and the causes and effects of strategic elite behaviour. My ongoing work embeds these perspectives in analyses of the political consequences of geo-spatial inequalities. Methodologically, I focus on advanced statistical modelling, georeferenced data, data visualisation, and causal inference.

My work has been published in Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and German Political Science Quarterly. Together with Paul C. Bauer, I am writing a textbook on Applied Causal Analysis with R (under contract with Chapman & Hall/CRC Press).

I frequently tweet about my research and about the activities of the MZES Social Science Data Lab on Twitter. My research has been covered in the international media, e.g., in the Guardian,  the Luzerner Zeitung, and Zeit Online. I have also given interviews to national and regional media outlets, including newspapers interviews with taz, radio interviews with SWR, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, and Deutschlandfunk Nova, as well as a TV interview with Rhein-Neckar Fernsehen.