Expertise

Comparative politics; political behavior; political economy; Europe

Biography & Research

Marc Jacob is an assistant professor of democracy and global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Before arriving at Notre Dame, Jacob was a postdoctoral scholar with the Polarization Research Lab at Stanford University. Jacob holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at Leipzig University, Germany, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Jacob’s research focuses on the intersection of political behavior, public opinion, and institutional change. He examines how ordinary citizens perceive and respond to transforming institutional environments, including processes of democratization and democratic backsliding. While Jacob mainly focuses on European democracies, his research projects also cover Turkey and Brazil.

Recent Work

• Citizen support for democracy, anti-pluralist parties in power and democratic backsliding (European Journal of Political Research)
• Citizens as a democratic safeguard? The sequence of sanctioning elite attacks on democracy (American Journal of Political Science)

Courses

• Crafting Research in Europe (elective for minor in European Studies)