Sven Jeschke has been the Personal Assistant to the Dean, and Manager of the Faculty of Social and Political Science, since 2008. In 2007 he completed two Master's degrees in Political Science and in International Economics at the University of Innsbruck.

Sven's research has focused on vocational education and training in Austria. Since 2014 he has been a trainer for apprentices at the University of Innsbruck. In 2016 he was awarded a distinction as a 'Qualified Tyrolean Apprentice Trainer' by the Government of Tyrol. In 2017 he finished his doctoral programme in Political Science with a dissertation on English in Vocational Education and Training. An Educational Policy Inventory of the Hybrid System in Tyrolean Vocational Schools and among Company Trainers: Foreign-Language Competency, Permeability and Structure-Formational Options Creating Structures to Enhance the Attractiveness of Vocational Education and Training in Tyrol and Austria.

David Willumsen studied political science and European politics at the London School of Economics. He received his PhD in 2013 from the European University Institute in Florence for a thesis on Party Unity in European Legislatures.

David has been working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Innsbruck since October 2016. In 2012 and 2013, he taught at the University of Zurich and worked as a researcher at NCCR Democracy. From July 2013 to September 2016, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the DFG-funded project 'Staggered membership renewal and differential time horizons in second chambers' at the Chair of Political Systems and European Integration of Prof. Dr. Goetz at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut Political Science in Munich.

His key research topics include legislative politics and political party research, as well as research on European politics and electoral behaviour.

Ludger Helms, MA (Freiburg, 1993), Dr. phil. (Heidelberg, 1997), Habilitation (Humboldt, Berlin, 2001), is Professor of Political Science (Chair of Comparative Politics) and Head of the Research Centre 'Spheres of Governance'.

Before joining the University of Innsbruck, he was a Senior Research Professor in the Department of International Relations at Webster University and a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Council. He has formerly held positions or visiting affiliations at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Göttingen, Humboldt University, Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Barnard College/Columbia University, the London School of Economics, the University of Tokyo, LUISS, and Central European University. In 2019, he will be a Visiting Professor at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.

His research focuses on comparative political institutions, political elites, executive politics and leadership in western democracies. He is the author of five books, some 50 book chapters, and more than 80 articles in learned journals. He also serves on the editorial board of several major journals, such as European Political Science, Government and Opposition, and The Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, and is the founding and lead editor of the Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership book series. He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives, forthcoming.

Marcelo Jenny studied political science and journalism and communication science at the University of Vienna (Mag. 1994). After several years working in survey research (SORA, Vienna), he completed his doctoral studies in Political Science at the University of Mannheim (2009).

From 2009 to 2016 he was Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Political Science of the University of Vienna and member of the Austrian National Electoral Study (AUTNES) for the Nationalrat Election 2013. He is currently a member of the ACIER Research Consortium of the Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck and Salzburg for the Nationalrat Election 2017.

His research focuses on electoral behaviour, election campaign and party competition, parliamentarism, content and sentiment analysis of political communication.

Lore Hayek graduated in 2009 with an MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She then returned to the University of Innsbruck as a pre-doc researcher in the context of AUTNES – Austrian National Election Study.

She gained her PhD in 2016 with a dissertation on Design of Political Parties – Poster Advertising in Austrian National Council Elections 1945–2013, and has been a postdoctoral assistant at the Department of Political Science since April 2017.

Lore's research interests include political communication, election campaigns, and quantitative methods.

Trix van Mierlo is a university assistant at the Doctoral Program Spheres of Governance: Institutions and Agency. She holds a Master’s degree in Conflict Studies and Human Rights from the University of Utrecht.

Her Master’s dissertation focused on the Mechanisms-Process Approach to Contentious Politics and unravelled the mechanisms to mobilisation for a social movement campaign protesting extrajudicial killings during the drug war in the Philippines, where she did fieldwork in 2016.

Trix is currently working on her PhD on mechanisms to mobilisation for collective action in sub-national authoritarian enclaves within consolidating democracies.