Research

Honorable Mention, 2021 Best Book Award, APSA European Politics Section.

Why was the Eurozone crisis so difficult to resolve? And why was it resolved in a manner in which some countries bore a much larger share of the pain than others? Building on macro-level statistical data, original survey data from interest groups, and comparative case studies, this book shows that the answers to these questions revolve around distributive struggles about how the costs of the Eurozone crisis should be divided among countries, and within countries, among different socioeconomic groups. Together with divergent but strongly held ideas about the 'right way' to conduct economic policy and asymmetries in the distribution of power among actors, severe distributive concerns of important actors lie at the root of the difficulties of resolving the Eurozone crisis as well as the difficulties to substantially reform the EMU. The book provides new insights into the politics of the Eurozone crisis by emphasizing three perspectives that have received scant attention in existing research: a comparative perspective on the Eurozone crisis by systematically comparing it to previous financial crises, an analysis of the whole range of policy options, including the ones not chosen, and a unified framework that examines crisis politics not just in deficit-debtor, but also in surplus-creditor countries.

[Open Access] [Replication]

Focusing on the effects of union membership on partisan preferences, this article explores how changes in Swedish industrial relations and trade-union politics have affected electoral support for Left parties since the mid-1980s. Our analysis shows that unionization among blue-collar workers has declined sharply since the mid-1990 and that this development has contributed to the decline of electoral support for the Social Democrats and for the Swedish Left as a whole. In addition, we find that the association between union membership and voting for Left parties has declined among white-collar employees without tertiary education as well as blue-collar workers over the same period. We argue that sectoral blue-collar and white-collar unions alike have responded to membership losses and intensified competition between unions by engaging in practices that render the partisan preferences of union members less distinctive than what they used to be (less Left-leaning relative to non-unionized counterparts).

[Link to paper]

What happens to peoples' social-policy preferences when their expectations concerning collective behavior are met, or even exceeded? And what conversely occurs when these expectations are unmet, and trust is thereby breached? Drawing on the first Italian COVID-19 lockdown as a massive exercise in collective action, this study tests how information on lockdown-compliance rates causally affects the social-policy preferences of Italian voters, conditional on their pretreatment levels of trust. Examining social-policy preferences across multiple dimensions, we find that trust is most closely linked to attitudes towards transfer generosity, as opposed to preferences on policy universalism and conditionality. Results highlight that neutral, fact-based information on cooperation levels can affect social-policy preferences—and that the direction of attitude change depends on whether one's trust has been met or breached.

[Link to paper]

Winner of 2023 CQ Press Award, APSA Legislative Studies Section
Winner of 2023 Best Paper Award, APSA Class and Inequality Section
Honorable Mention, 2023 EGEN Award, The Empirical Study of Gender Research Network

Can policies aimed at increasing gender representation also shape the social class makeup of legislatures? This paper examines that question through a natural experiment in Italy, where some municipalities temporarily adopted mandatory gender quotas on candidate lists in the 1990s. Leveraging archival data, I show that these quotas led to more women being elected, es- pecially from lower-middle and working-class backgrounds, without reducing the presence of working-class men. Quota municipalities also saw higher voter turnout and legislative seat share gains for locally rooted parties, suggesting that class diversification was driven by shifts in voter behavior. These findings show that gender quotas can generate broader representational change, reshaping the social profile of legislative bodies via demand-side change. The paper contributes to our understanding of the downstream effects of inclusion for democratic institutions.

[Working paper]

Proportionality in electoral systems is typically viewed as essential for representative government. This paper shows that disproportionality in seat allocation rules under PR can increase working-class representation. The effect is mechanical: because working-class candidates are typically ranked lower on party lists, increases in party magnitude expand the range of list positions that enter office. I study a natural experiment generated by a municipality-level electoral reform in Italy in 1993 that introduced a majority bonus in legislative elections, guaranteeing the plurality-winning party a super-majority of seats. Using a reverse difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that the reform increased the num- ber of working-class councilors, even as it reduced both the number of parties represented in office and the number of parties competing for seats, without affecting voter turnout, the vote shares of election-winning parties, or the ideological composition of municipal governments. Pre-reform dif- ferences in working-class representation emerged only in competitive PR contexts where no party secured a clear majority, suggesting that disproportional seat-allocation rules enhance descriptive rep- resentation when party competition otherwise limits list penetration.

[Working paper]

European parties increasingly nominate immigrant-origin candidates to appeal to growing immigrant electorates, with non-citizen voting rights playing a key role in boosting immigrant descriptive representation. However, the downstream impact of such reforms on gender representation remains theoretically ambiguous. Analyzing novel data from Switzerland, we show that non-citizen enfranchisement increased both male and female immigrant-origin candidacies in local elections, primarily at the expense of native men. While immigrant-origin candidates also gained more seats post-reform, this advantage accrued only to men. The gendered gap in officeholding reflects differences in party strategies: immigrant-origin women were disproportionately nominated by populist-right parties, whose voters tend to hold stronger anti-immigration attitudes. These findings underscore the intersectional effects of electoral reforms: although non-citizen voting rights can generate gender-progressive gains in candidacy, they often fail to reduce gender disparities in political advancement—limiting broader representational change in elected office.

[Current draft available upon request]

A large body of literature has examined the drivers of welfare state expansion, highlighting how both labor and capital interests have contributed to the introduction of redistributive policies. Focusing on the interwar period, this paper extends that literature by advancing a labor mobilization argument, whereby capital interests strategically expanded residual social spending in response to a newly enfranchised and increasingly well-organized working-class electorate. To test this argument, we leverage detailed municipality-level data from Sweden on Social Democratic party membership, left-party voter support, and social spending during the interwar period (1919–1938). Our empirical strategy exploits the staggered expansion of local Social Democratic party branches and estimates their effects using a recent extension of the difference-in-differences design. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, we find that spending on poverty relief increased in the direct aftermath of social democratic party branch formation—even when holding constant the redistributive preferences of the local electorate.

[Current draft available upon request]