Lutz Hofer

Lutz Hofer (1979) obtained a BA (cum laude) in Communication Studies, Political Science, and Sociology at the University of Duesseldorf/Germany in 2003 and an MA in European Communication Studies at the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Amsterdam in 2005. His thesis focused on trust building in government communication (supervision: Klaus Schönbach and Kees Brants). From 2004 to 2006, Lutz has been co-initiator and scientific director of the Duesseldorf Forum Political Communication (DFPK) that has become a leading conference for young scholars in this particular field of research. Amongst others, he has gained experience as assistant and speechwriter to a Prime Minister of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia as well as Research Assistant in a strategic communications agency. From 2006 to 2007 (fixed-term), he held a position as Academic Assistant at the Department of Communications Research at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Christina Holtz-Bacha). In January 2008, Lutz moved to Amsterdam to join the ASSR as an Academic Assistant in Training for his PhD.

In the NWO-funded project “Contested Democracies”, his research centers on “Changes in Style and Substance in the Media Coverage of Political Parties” (preliminary title; supervision: Wouter van der Brug and Philip van Praag). Lutz investigates the claim of a steep increase in the way media would portray politics in terms of party leaders (and not of parties), their concrete political actions (and not their ideology, marking a shift from input- to output-legitimacy), their style (and not political substance), and their populist tone. In a quantitative content analysis, he will compare data from 1980 to the 2000s across six different countries that vary in the contexts of their political systems and media systems.