Christina Zuber, Ph.D.

christina.zuber@uni-konstanz.de

Universität Konstanz

Country: Germany

Website

About Me:

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Before joining the University of Konstanz, I held postdoctoral positions at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences and the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and taught at the Universities of Zurich and Lucerne. My background is in comparative politics and my main expertise is comparative federalism and ethno-regionalist parties. More recently, I have been gaining a profile also in the field of migration studies, with a focus on immigrant integration policies. All my research is comparative and cases come from Europe, both Eastern and Western Europe.

Research Interests

European Politics

Political Parties and Interest Groups

Immigration & Citizenship

Race, Ethnicity and Politics

Imperial Legacies

Immigrant Integration Policies

Federalism, Regionalism, Decentralization

Ethnic Politics

Countries of Interest

Serbia

Germany

Spain

My Research:

My background is in comparative politics and my research interests lie at the intersection of comparative federalism, ethnic politics, party politics and migration studies. My current main research projects are on immigrant integration policies in Spain, Italy, and Germany and on the electoral mobilisation of "class" and "nation" in the democratising multinational Habsburg Empire (1896-1911).

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2019) Explaining the immigrant integration laws of German, Italian and Spanish regions: Sub-state nationalism and multi-level party politics., Regional Studies

How do sub-state regions respond to immigration and what drives their policy choices? Combining the cross-national literature on citizenship and integration policy with the literature on immigration federalism, it is hypothesized that sub-state nationalism and multilevel party politics explain why some regions formulate more restrictive immigrant integration policies than others. Analyzing integration laws of German, Italian and Spanish regions demonstrates that socioeconomically inclusive measures dominate, regardless of national context. Where restrictive provisions occur at all, they are associated with minority nationalism and the strength of anti-immigrant parties, while leftist regions facing right-wing national governments tend to adopt a more inclusive policies.

(2019) Check Your Truth Conditions!Clarifying the Relationship between Theories of Causation and Social Science Methods for Causal Inference, Sociological Methods and Research

Theories of causation in philosophy ask what makes causal claims true and establish the so-called truth conditions allowing one to separate causal from noncausal relationships. We argue that social scientists should be aware of truth conditions of causal claims because they imply which method of causal inference can establish whether a specific claim holds true. A survey of social scientists shows that this is worth emphasizing because many respondents have unclear concepts of causation and link methods to philosophical criteria in an incoherent way. We link five major theories of causation to major small and large-n methods of causal inference to provide clear guidelines to researchers and improve dialogue across methods. While most theories can be linked to more than one method, we argue that structural counterfactual theories are most useful for the social sciences since they require neither social and natural laws nor physical processes to assess causal claims.