Jacob Gunderson
Associate Senior Lecturer
Department of Political ScienceAbout Jacob Gunderson
About Me
I am an associate senior lecturer at the University of Gothenburg. I defended my dissertation in January 2023 in Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg in connection with the ERC-funded INTRAPARTY project led by Prof. Ann-Kristin Kölln from 2023 to 2024. I was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the European University Institute, financed by the ERC Advanced Grant TRANSNATIONAL, led by Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, in Winter 2024. In 2017, I received my BA in Political Science and German with minors in Political Economy and European Studies (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Carleton College, and I earned a MA in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019.
Research
My research interests include party competition in developed democracies, party systems, inequality, intraparty politics, and political behavior. My research has been published in the British Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, Policy and Society, Party Politics, the European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, and West European Politics. In my dissertation, I argue that one cause of political change, broadly defined, in European politics is the weakening of party brands—the image in voters’ minds of who parties are and what they stand for. These party brands are crucial because they form the foundation of how citizens identify, distinguish, and evaluate the political parties competing for their votes. I deploy large-N quantitative, experimental, and interview methods to investigate various ways that party brands have changed over time and influence citizens' political behavior, as well as develop a deeper understanding of the processes that have led to brand convergence.
Beyond my dissertation, I have active research projects on the nature of party distinction and classification into party families, the determinants of positional blurring, the identification and influence of party factions, electoral volatility, and the structure and dimensionality of party systems.
Teaching
In addition to supervising at the BA, MA, and PhD levels, I also lecture on party systems, electoral systems, representation, and the European Union at the MA level. I am also the course coordinator for EU2113/EU2121: European Integration: Current Research and Theory and co-coordinator of the Master's Thesis course in European Studies. I have also engaged in an Erasmus+ teaching exchange with the University of Konstanz to teach a MA course titled, "The Politicization and Contestation of European Integration" in the summer of 2025.
For more information, see my personal website: jacobrgunderson.com.