I work at LMU Munich, leading a research group on Mobilization and Participation in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe. If you’re interested in working with us 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 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] lmu [dot] de

Recent publications

• Lukashenka’s constitutional plebiscite and the polarization of Belarusian society. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, with Fabian Burkhardt
• The activist personality: Extraversion, agreeableness, and opposition activism in authoritarian regimes. Comparative Political Studies, with Graeme Robertson
• Protest and Opposition. Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society, 2nd edition edited by Graeme Gill

Picture copyright: Caroline Schreer