New PhD student

Victor Nordgaard Hejstvig-Larsen
Victor Nordgaard Hejstvig-Larsen Photo: Private

Hello everyone!

My name is Victor, and I am very happy because I just started my journey as a phd student here at the department, joining the behavior section. While phd'ing may be new to me, I'm not a stranger to the department. Over the past years, I've worked as a TA in public policy and 'almen statskundskab', and as a student research assistant on Martin Bisgaard's project. You might recognize me from liberally using my coffee machine privileges during those times.

I'll be doing a 3.5 years phd where I'll delve into questions of understanding what politicians make of (changes to) public opinion. The inspiration for this project started from an interest in representation research, particularly how politicians acquire knowledge about citizen preferences. Through reading, contemplating and my work on the Bisgaard project, I'm now quite sure that we need to focus on studying politicians' awareness of how citizens form and alter their preferences reactively, rather than the other way around (politicians reacting passively to citizen preferences). I am very fortunate to have great supervisors in the form of the aforementioned Martin Bisgaard aswell as Roman Senninger. I expect great things from them. I also started head-on with a TA-job in Methods II.

I was very lucky to be appointed office number 1341-112. Feel free to pop by for a chat about representation, politicians and public opinion. Other topics of interests are causal inference and prediction, R vs STATA discussions and an attempt to sometimes understand a little statistics. If all the talks of politics and methods ever gets tiring, I also do food & wine, 3rd division Counter-Strike and favourite cleaning chemicals (I'm from Borup, Midtsjælland). Looking forward to meeting everyone and the exciting years ahead!