Judith Spirig is a postdoctoral affiliate of the Stanford-Zurich Immigration Policy Lab and previously held the position of postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich’s Department of Political Science, where she earned her PhD in Spring 2018.
After BA studies at the University of Basel in philosophy, economics and English literature, she completed an MSc in International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2015, she received one of the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Doc.CH grants to write her doctoral thesis on the effect of extra-legal factors on asylum appeal decisions. In 2016 and 2017, she continued her research at the LSE’s Government Department and Stanford University’s Political Science Department and Immigration Policy Lab.
Her main research interests include political behavior, attitude formation, discrimination against and attitudes toward out-groups.
As a Max Weber Fellow, she will leverage quasi-experimental research designs and historical data to study the roots of contemporary exclusionary attitudes. In particular, she will explore the transmission of historic anti-Semitism and its connection to contemporary exclusionary attitudes, such as Islamophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-Semitism, in Switzerland.
Judith has (co-)taught classes in comparative politics and quantitative methods, including a BA-level seminar entitled ‘Forced Migration and Its (Political) Consequences’, a Capstone course in which MA students carried out the project ‘Analyzing Human Trafficking Data’ for IOM (with Marco Steenbergen), and an MA-level course on ‘Statistical Models in Political Analysis’, where she served as teaching fellow (taught by Lukas Stötzer).