Staff

The many faces of GESIS

Vita

Piotr Koc is a political scientist and sociologist, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Survey Design and Methodology at GESIS and an affiliated researcher at the Chair of Empirical Democracy Research in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, where he teaches seminars on measurement and political sociology.

He obtained a Master’s degree in Political Science and Public Administration from the University of Konstanz and a PhD from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he was part of the Research Group on Computational Social Science. He was also a research fellow at the Chair of Political Methodology in the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich.

Piotr’s main research focus is political methodology, particularly measurement issues. He has published on the measurement of political participation and the use of sparsity-inducing priors in dynamic latent variable models. His current research agenda revolves around dynamic group-level IRT models, involving extensive simulation studies and developing methods that use estimates from these models to evaluate the effects of policy interventions on public opinion.



Publications

Journal article

Binding, Garret, and Piotr Koc. 2025. "Adding Regularized Horseshoes to the Dynamics of Latent Variable Models." Political Analysis 33 (2): 171-177. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2024.30.

Plisiecki, Hubert, Piotr Koc, Maria Flakus, and Artur Pokropek. 2025. "Predicting emotion intensity in Polish political texts: comparing supervised models and large language models in a low-resource language." Quality & Quantity online first: . doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-025-02116-8.

Koc, Piotr. 2024. "Beyond Continuous versus Categorical Dichotomy: Uncovering Latent Structure of Non-electoral Political Participation Using Zero-Inflated Models." Social Indicators Research 171 (1): 215-236. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03250-2.