Isabella Rebasso, PhD

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna, working within the ERC-funded PARTISAN project led by Markus Wagner.

My research sits at the intersection of political psychology and political behavior, with a focus on how evaluations on emotions, polarization and political engagement.

During my PhD at the HotPolitics Lab, I studied how distinct evaluations of political events relate to discrete emotions and the link between political sophistication and emotional engagement.

My current work examines the role of moralization, and social perception in shaping political attitudes and behavior. I am especially interested in how individuals interpret characteristics of political groups, how these perceptions translate into intolerance or cooperation, and under what conditions political conflict becomes morally charged.

Across my projects, I combine experimental methods, cross-national survey data, machine learning and computational text analysis to study these processes in diverse contexts. A central strand of my research investigates how people infer political identities from social cues and how accurate these inferences are. Relatedly, I study how moralized perceptions of in-groups and out-groups influence behavioral outcomes such as social distance, avoidance, and support for democratic norms.

My work has been published in Political Behavior, Communication Research, and Politics and the Life Sciences.