Email: l.j.herbig@uva.nl
You can find my academic CV here.
I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam and the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam working within the COVIDEU project.
In my thesis, I focus on the public justification and (crisis) communication surrounding restrictive measures and their subsequent effects. Specifically, my research examines how intra-EU border closures and border controls impact political attitudes such as EU support, paying close attention to the communication strategies and justifications employed by various political actors. Through this approach, I investigate how crisis communication shapes public perceptions and political responses to policy measures during times of heightened uncertainty.
To learn more about those topics I apply various quantitative (DiD and RDD designs), text-as-data (LLMs, SSML, manual content analysis) and experimental methods (survey experiments).
Previously, I have worked on the Viral Communication project where I conducted a longitudinal panel and interview study in Germany and co-authored various papers.
Selected Publications
Herbig., L., Unan, A., Kuhn, T., Rodriguez, I., Rodon, T. & Kluever, H. (accepted). Closed borders, closed minds? COVID-related border closures, EU support and hostility towards immigrants. European Journal of Political Research.
Rodríguez, I., Rodon, T., Unan, A., Herbig, L., Kluever, H. & Kuhn, T. (2025). Benchmarking pandemic response: How the UK’s COVID-19 vaccine roll-out impacted popular sup-port for the EU. British Journal of Political Science, 55, [e35]. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000802
Jensen, E. A., Wagoner, B., Pfleger, A., Herbig, L. J., & Watzlawik, M. (2021). Making sense of unfamiliar COVID-19 vaccines: How national origin affects vaccination willingness. PLoS ONE, 16(12), [e0261273]. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261273
Herbig, L., Wagoner, B., Watzlawik, M., Jensen, E. A., Lorenz, L., & Pfleger, A. (2022). Trajectories of Experience Through the Pandemic: A Qualitative Longitudinal Dataset. Frontiers in Political Science, 4, [791494]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.791494
Wagoner, B., & Herbig, L. (2022). The Future of the Past: Memory and social change following the COVID-19 pandemic. In G. Donnelly, & A. Montuori (Eds.), Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures (1 ed., pp. 269-279). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003020714
Jensen, E. A., Pfleger, A., Herbig, L., Wagoner, B., Lorenz, L., & Watzlawik, M. (2021). What Drives Belief in Vaccination Conspiracy Theories in Germany? Frontiers in Communication, 6, [678335]. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.678335
Work in Progress
Justifying Border Policies: German Government Communication Between 2013 and 2023 (together with Theresa Kuhn, Katjana Gattermann and Olga Eisele)
Defending National Border Policies: An experimental study of Government Strategies and Public Perception in the EU (together with Theresa Kuhn)
Between Inclusion and Exclusion: How European Identity Shapes Preferences for Intra-EUBorder and Migration Policies (together with Isabela Zeberio and Theresa Kuhn)
Making sense of the pandemic through historical analogies (together with Brady Wagoner)
A shot in the dark? A Longitudinal Study of Trends and Reasoning in COVID-19 Vaccination Willingness (together with Brady Wagoner)