Mathias Poertner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science. His research lies at the intersection of political behavior, democratic representation, political parties and movements, and political methodology, with a regional focus on Latin America and Europe. In his work, he uses a variety of methods, including (field, survey, and natural) experiments, surveys, and fieldwork intensive qualitative techniques, to study how political participation and representation are shaped by social identities, such as partisanship, ethnicity, and gender. His first line of research studies these issues by examining how identification with new parties and electoral support for them are shaped by new types of civil society organizations. His second line of research explores the role of ethnic and gender identities in the context of immigration. Through a series of articles and a second, co-authored book project, he studies the causes of discrimination towards immigrants and explore how shared social norms can reduce inter-group conflict between immigrants and natives. His prior research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, and the Journal of Experimental Political Science. Prior to joining the department in 2021, he held a faculty position at Texas A&M University (2019-2021) and a postdoctoral fellowship with the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network (2018-2019). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.