Biography

Lennart Schürmann's research examines how people engage in political and social change, with a special focus on legislative and protest politics. His work lies at the intersection of comparative politics and political sociology. During his Max Weber Fellowship, Lennart will investigate how social movement activists claim representative functions in contemporary democracies (supply side), and how citizens perceive these representative claims (demand side). By emphasising the performative dimension of representation, his project bridges the gap between innovative theoretical literature on representation and research focused on social movements. To that end, he applies a variety of methods, with a particular focus on computational text and video analysis tools, as well as survey experiments.

Before coming to the EUI, Lennart was a postdoctoral fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Centre for European Studies at Harvard University and at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre. He received his PhD from the University of Cologne and was a member of the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences. During his PhD, he was also a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

His work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, among others.