Dr. Luciano Santander

I am a political scientist and hold a PhD in Sociology from the Freie Universität Berlin. My work focuses on political sociology, studies on the far-right, and European and Latin American politics. My research examines elite radicalization, authoritarianism, and the reconfiguration of right-wing actors in democratic contexts, with particular attention to Chile and broader comparative debates across Europe and Latin America.

I work with qualitative and mixed-methods designs — in-depth interviews with hard-to-reach political elites, ethnographic fieldwork, and discourse analysis — alongside computational analysis of political communication and digital mobilization. My research is comparative in scope, drawing on fieldwork across Chile, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.