Marie Heldgaard Seestedt

Marie Heldgaard Seestedt

PhD fellow

My research lies within the related fields of political behaviour, public opinion, generational divides, economic inequality and political sociology. I am especially interested in how our personal relations shape our political choices. I mostly work quantitatively with data from Danish registries, survey data, cohort studies and combinations thereof. I hold a Master’s degree in Social Science and Mathematics from University of Copenhagen and thus appreciate substantive as well as methodological and technical challenges.

Current research

In my PhD project, I investigate the role of family ties in mitigating generational divides in public opinion and fostering solidarity between generations at a time when populations are ageing in many Western democracies and generational conflicts are arising around numerous issues. The project aims at understanding the role of inter-generational family ties in opinion formation on public spending, in particular vertical redistribution, and on climate change opinion. Furthermore, it investigates how inter-generational family ties relate to attitudes towards, and solidarity with, other generations. The project is supervised by Carolin Rapp with Peter Thisted Dinesen as my co-supervisor.

I have previously worked on the project ”Unequal, alientated and unwell” where we examine individual and societal consequences of economic inequality looking at the relationship between economic inequality in local environment and individual well-being, social ties and vertical ties. The project combines micro-level information on economic inequality from Danish registries with survey information on social and political attitudes.

Moreover, I have worked at the Danish Center for Social Science Research (VIVE) on projects related to inequality, ageing and the welfare state. Here, I worked with the Danish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, for which I was involved in collecting the fifth wave.

Teaching

I have taught Methods 1, 2 and 3 on the BA programme in Political Science and the elective "Boomers and babies: The role of family ties and generational divides in political behaviour" on the MA programme in Political Science. 

Fields of interest

  • Political behavior and public opinion
  • Generational divides and inter-generational solidarity
  • Economic inequality
  • Political Sociology
  • Political Economy
  • Advanced quantitative methods
  • Quasi-experimental designs and causal inference with observational data
  • Political Data Science

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