Welcome to my webpage!

I am Full Professor and Chair of Political Sociology and Social Policy at the Humboldt University, Berlin. Located at the intersection between comparative politics, political sociology and political economy, my research is guided by an interest in how structural challenges such as the transformation of welfare states, labor market inequality and climate change affect various aspects of political life.

I am one of the PIs in the Einstein Research Unit "Coping with Affective Polarization", where I lead the Berlin Polarization Monitor, a large-scale panel study to track dynamics around affective polarization in Berlin and Germany.

I am also a founding member of the Progressive Politcs Research Network, a network of social science researchers with the goal to make scientific findings more accessible to the wider public and political practitioners.

Prior to joining the Humboldt University, I was Professor of Public Policy at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and a Senior Researcher with an Ambizione-Project on women’s political alignment at the Department of Political Science of the University of Zurich. I obtained my PhD in 2012 from the University of Zurich and joined the Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy (SOCIUM) in Bremen in the same year. I also worked at the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Oxford and the University of Essen-Duisburg.

You can find my work in the publication section of the website. You'll find information about ongoing projects in the research section.

New Publications

Aidan Regan, Hanna Schwander, Cyril Benoît and Tim Vlandas. 2026. "Growth, Democracy or Climate Action? - The New Political Trilemma of Advanced Capitalism". Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing

Bastian Becker and Hanna Schwander. 2025. "Who wants what, and why? Attitude polarization and political viability of UBI". Journal of European Social Policy, doi: 10.1177/09589287251400044

Bastian Becker, Hanna Schwander, Luke Shuttleworth, Thorsten Faas, Denis Gerstorf and Céline Teney. 2025. "The Berlin Polarization Monitor: A Panel Study of Partisan and Issue-Based Polarization in Germany (2025–2027)". OSF Preprint, doi: 10.31235/osf.io/msc7e_v1

Dennis Klinke, Jannes Jacobsen, Manuel Dierse, Thorsten Faas, Denis Gerstorf, Hannah Helal, Swen Hutter, David Schieferdecker, Hanna Schwander, Christian von Scheve and Jule Specht. 2025. "Social media sampling is an effective way to access hard to survey populations and low prevalence groups". International Journal of Social Research Methodology, doi: 10.1080/13645579.2025.2564866

Hanna Schwander. 2025. "Climate change as a new research field for comparative political economy", in: Marino Regini (ed.) Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 517-535. Edward Elgar Publishing