Katharina Pfaff is a University Assistant / postdoc in the Department of Government and part of the research project “Digitize! Computational Social Sciences in the digital and social Transformation” since September 2022. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and a visiting researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).

In her research, Katharina analyses political violence and conflict at the national and sub-national level. She is especially interested in the political factors and outcomes of contentious politics, e.g. what explains conflict intensity in a particular region and how are political representatives responding to public protest? To answer these and related research questions, she uses, amongst others, text as data to retrieve and quantify core information about protest events.

After studying international economics at the universities of Tübingen, St. Gallen, Göttingen, and Leuven, Katharina earned her doctoral degree in economics from the University of Hamburg (Institute of Law and Economics) in 2016. In her dissertation, she examined how shocks like natural disasters, economic crises, or coups d’état affect the repression of physical integrity rights in democratic and non-democratic countries.