Academic publications

Walder, M.; Bailer, S. and Giger, N. (2025). Does it matter what you do in parliament? On the effects of politicians’ behavior on vote choice. Accepted for publication in Legislative Studies Quarterly.

Claessen, C.; Walder, M. and Alberto, A. (2025) Picture-perfect: On the relationship between party leader visibility and voting during party leader elections. Accepted for publication in Visual Communication Quaterly

Sciarini, P. and Walder, M. (2025). Unequal Voices: The Educational Gap of Voting Choices in the Swiss Direct Democracy. Accepted for publication in the Swiss Political Science Review.

Walder, M. (2025) Latent Ideological Positions of Swiss Parties and Subsets of the Population. Swiss Political Science Review. doi:10.1111/spsr.70003

Walder, M., Fivaz, J., Schwarz, D., and Giger, N. (2024). Explaining the (non-) use of voting advice applications. Digital Government: Research and Practice, 5(3), 1-29. doi: doi:10.3389/fpos.2024.1425406

Walder, M. (2024) On the same space? Measuring the ideology of voters and political elites. Frontiers in Political Science doi:10.3389/fpos.2024.1425406

Walder, M., and Strijbis, O. (2023). The partisan heuristic and the voters’ knowledge: The essential role of the information environment. Electoral Studies, 84, 1026-41. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102641

Walder, M., and Strijbis, O. (2022). Negative Party Identification and the Use of Party Cues in the Direct Democratic Context. Politics and Governance, 10 (4), 325–335. doi:10.17645/pag.v10i4.5702

Walder, M. (2021) Parties and Voters in Interaction: Lessons from Direct Democracy. Ph.D. Dissertation

The complete publication list can be found here.

Research

Senior Researcher (Since 2023)

Online News Exposure: A Threat to Democracy? How Digital Transformation Affects Opinion Formation, Political Polarization and Trust.

University of Geneva & University of Basel
Under the Direction of Prof. Denise Traber and Prof. Nathalie Giger:

Post-Doctoral Researcher (2021-2025)

Online News Exposure: A Threat to Democracy? How Digital Transformation Affects Opinion Formation, Political Polarization and Trust. National Research Program on Digital Transformation (NRP77)

University of Geneva
Under the Direction of Prof. Nathalie Giger

Post-Doctoral Researcher (2021-2022)

Visual Politician - Inclusiveness and Exclusiveness in Visual Political Communication.

University of Basel
Under the Direction of Prof. Stefanie Bailer

Doctoral Candidate (2017-2021)

The Effect of Campaign Events on Direct Democratic Choices; Evidence from Prediction Market.

University of Zurich
Under the Direction of Prof. Oliver Strijbis

Teaching

Fall 2020 & Fall 2018: Political Campaign in Elections and Direct Democracy. Bachelor Option class in the University of Zurich.

Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024: Méthodes Quantitatives. Bachelor Mandatory class in the University of Geneva.

Programming

Walder, M. (2025) RSwissPos: R package to get data on Swiss direct democratic ballots. Software access at https://github.com/maxwaldo/RSwissPos

Walder, M. (2025) Measuring latent ideological position of subsets of the Swiss population with RSwissPos. Access to the Vignette at https://maxwaldo.github.io/Latent_pos_subset_pop.html

Various levels of knowledge in R, Python, Javascript. Also uses HTML, CSS and NodeJs for website development. To know more about my projects, visit my Github Page.

Contact