Prof. Dr. Thomas Poguntke has held the Chair of Comparative Politics at MUHS-Gelsenkirchen since 2010 and is co-director of the Gelsenkirchen Party Research Institute PRuF. His research interests include the comparative analysis of political parties. In this context, he is coordinating with Susan Scarrow (Houston) and Paul Webb (Sussex) a longitudinal study of political parties in more than 50 countries (https://www.politicalpartydb.org).

Within DIID, he will work primarily on issues of digitized intra-party democracy and digital campaigning.