Carlo Hofer, BSc (TU Munich), MSc (Venice), PhD (Warwick)

Profile

Carlo Hofer is a quantitative political scientist and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London, working with Prof. Maria Grasso on the Horizon Europe project DEMETRA on deliberative policy-making for sustainable food systems, a seven-country, eleven-institution consortium running 2024-2027. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Warwick (2026), an MSc in Management from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and a BSc in Business with Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.

His research examines how the structures that surround people – online information environments on one hand, residential neighbourhoods on the other – condition political attitudes during periods of democratic stress. He works with causal-inference designs applied to panel data and survey experiments, complemented by geospatial analysis at fine spatial scales.

carlohofer.com
linkedin.com/in/carlo-hofer
ORCID: 0009-0007-4786-2731

Research

Research Interests:

Affective polarisation; immigration attitudes; media exposure and political behaviour; residential segregation and contextual effects; deliberative democracy; causal inference with panel data; survey experiments; geospatial methods; climate change attitudes; political humour.

Doctoral research

Carlo’s PhD examined how online media environments and residential neighbourhoods shape political attitudes in the UK. Drawing on eleven waves of the British Election Study Internet Panel (over 100,000 observations), it combines within-person fixed-effects models, an instrumental-variables design, cross-lagged panel models, and fine-grained measures of neighbourhood segregation. The viva was held on 31 March 2026; the examiners were Prof. Peter Thisted Dinesen (University of Copenhagen) and Prof. Özlem Atikcan (University of Warwick), and the outcome was a pass with no corrections. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Vincenzo Bove and Dr Andreas Murr.

Current research

• DEMETRA (Horizon Europe): comparative study of deliberative participatory processes on sustainable food systems across seven European countries, with responsibilities spanning consortium-wide coordination, the project’s ethics governance, qualitative field research, and policy briefs for European, national, and local audiences.

• From the PhD: two papers in preparation – one on online information consumption and political affective polarisation, and one on neighbourhood segregation and immigration attitudes.

• Political humour (ESRC): a series of co-authored projects on humorous political communication – climate change attitudes, intergroup affective polarisation, and intergenerational hostility.

Publications

Refereed journal articles

• Co-author. “Polarising punchlines: The influence of intergroup humour on partisan affective polarisation.” Revise and resubmit, Political Studies.

In preparation

• Sole-authored. “Downloading polarisation: Online information consumption and political affective polarisation in the UK.” Target submission: summer 2026.
• Sole-authored. “Good neighbours? Neighbourhood segregation and attitudes toward immigration in the UK.” Target submission: summer 2026.
• Lead author. “Breaking the ice: The impact of humorous communication on climate change attitudes and political participation.” ESRC humour project.
• Co-author. “‘OK Boomer’: The influence of humour on intergenerational hostility and polarisation.” ESRC humour project.
• Lead author. “Ecological and economic cost of terror: The impact of terrorist attacks on London commuting patterns.”

Policy briefs and data deposits

• Two DEMETRA project policy briefs (co-developed with the consortium; addressed to European Commission stakeholders, national and local policymakers, municipalities, and practitioners).
• Four datasets from the ESRC humour project deposited on the UK Data Service ReShare repository (survey and three pre-registered survey experiments).