I’m Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics (with a focus on Eastern Europe) at the University of Fribourg/CH. I am also affiliated with LMU Munich, where I lead a research group on Mobilization and Representation in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe. If you’re interested in working with me on political parties and/or movements in Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and beyond, do get in contact! More info on the research project here.
My research focuses on parties, contentious politics, and social movements in Eastern and Western Europe, with a special focus on the long-term interactions between protest and politics across different regime types. This includes an emerging research program on political representation under adverse political and economic circumstances. My work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, the European Journal of Political Research, and other places. It has been featured in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, The Conversation, and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag.
Together with Amy Eaglestone, I am corresponding editor of the Moldovan Analytical Digest, the first issue of which hass appeared in January 2025.
Together with Fabian Burkhardt, I am also country anchor for Moldova in the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project DALP II (Herbert Kitschelt / Kerem Yildirim).
Together with Ben Noble and Morvan Lallouet I have co-authored a book on Navalny’s politics and his movement for a broad, non-specialist readership. It has been published in English with Hurst Publishers (UK) and with Oxford University Press (US), as well as in several translations.
In my PhD, defended in January 2020, I compared trajectories of local protest institutionalization in authoritarian regimes – on the example of the ‘For Fair Elections’ protest cycle in four Russian regions. My academic book project is an extension of this work.
I have worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM) at the University of Bremen, working on a comparative project on protest dynamics in Germany as part of the Research Institute Social Cohesion. From 2020 through 2023, I was also an Associated Junior Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study, HWK).
Until 2020, I worked at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen and have been a visiting researcher at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
To advance the Open Science movement in the social sciences, I’m a curator of data sets on protests, parties, and politicians at Discuss Data.
Feel free to get in contact at:
jan [dot] dollbaum [at] unifr [dot] ch
jan [dot] dollbaum [at] lmu [dot] de
News:
- 03/25: Publication. Resisting the far right: Explaining divergent countermobilization trajectories in two German cities. Mobilization, with Larissa Meier, Priska Daphi and Sebastian Haunss
- 02/25: Publication. Digital ballots, partisan bias: digital authoritarianism and support for internet voting in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Democratization, with Fabian Burkhardt
- 02/25: Publication. Moldau: Parlamentarisch-präsidentielles System und fragile Demokratie. Springer.
- 01/25: Interview with the Moscow Times on opposition in Russia
- 08/24: Start as assistant professor for comparative politics at the University of Fribourg/CH
- 06/24: Publication. Local Protest Event Analysis: providing a more comprehensive picture? West European Politics, with Priska Daphi, Larissa Meier and Sebastian Haunss
Picture copyright: Caroline Schreer