Dr Philip Leifeld joins the School of Social and Political Sciences in July 2016 as Senior Lecturer in Research Methods. He is a member of the Q-Step Centre and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies.

Between 2011 and 2016, Philip held postdoctoral and group leader positions at the University of Konstanz, the University of Bern, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) in Zurich. He received his PhD in Politics and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz in 2011 after being a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods for four years.

Philip's work focuses on social and political networks. Substantively, he is interested in the interactions of interest groups, state actors and other stakeholders in the policy process. His new book is about Policy Debates as Dynamic Networks: German Pension Politics and Privatisation Discourse. Philip's work deals with the roles of information exchange, policy forums, leadership provision, and endogenous preference formation for the topology of political networks.

His methodological interests cover extensions of exponential random graph models, temporal network models, network diffusion, combinations of qualitative content analysis with network analysis, and the presentation of statistical results. Philip has released several software packages, including a Java software for combining content analysis with network analysis (Discourse Network Analyser) and several packages for the statistical computing environment R (texreg, xergm, btergm, tnam, and rDNA).

Philip's work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Statistical Software, Computational Social Networks, Public Choice, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and other journals.

First published: 3 June 2016

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