Victoria Haerter, PhD
Postdoctoral Researcher (Ass.-Prof. Dr. David Weisstanner)
Alpenquai 4 • victoria.haerter@unilu.ch
CV
Victoria Haerter is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lucerne, where she joined in October 2025 as part of the four-year SNSF project “Party Politics and the Politicization of Health Care” (2025–2029), led by Asst. Prof. Dr. David Weisstanner.
She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Bern, where her research focused on the intersection of political psychology and political behavior. Before her doctoral studies, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Zurich and a Master’s degree in Comparative and International Studies with a focus on Social Data Science from ETH Zurich.
Research
Her research examines how psychological factors shape political attitudes, behavior, and broader social phenomena, such as the emergence and persistence of conspiracy beliefs. Combining insights from psychology and political science, her work uses quantitative and computational methods to understand how individual-level psychological processes influence collective political outcomes. She employs survey data and computational text analysis to investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying political behavior.
Publications
- Haerter, V. A. (2025). Counterspeech encouraging users to adopt the perspective of minority groups reduces hate speech and its amplification on social media. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-05041-w
- Haerter, V. A. (2025). Divided by morality? Moral foundations of affective polarisation during hard times. Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957251315046
- Haerter, V. A. (2025). Value Foundations of Conspiracy Thinking: New Evidence From European Democracies. Social Science Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.70011
