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 more women in office improve social class diversity in politics? Probing this question, I examine Italian archival data to test how an exogenous increase in the number of female policymakers can have downstream effects on legislature class composition. I evaluate a natural experiment in which some Italian municipalities temporarily introduced obligatory gender quotas on party lists. When in force, quotas benefited mainly lower middle- and working-class women and did not harm the political opportunities of working-class men. Improved intersectional gender-class representation is driven by increases in the legislature seat shares of locally organized parties, and higher rates of voter turnout. Results thus suggest that quota-induced salience of gender issues contributed to improving class diversity in Italian municipal politics via a shift in the party preference of the local median voter.

Proportionality in electoral systems is often seen as the best means to produce statistically representative government. In this paper, I argue that majority bonuses---whereby the party that obtains a plurality of votes automatically obtains an absolute majority in the legislature---can bolster the number of statistically atypical working-class candidates that manage to obtain office in PR systems. The difference is mechanically driven, as workers are systematically granted lower placements on party lists. Majority bonuses increase the number of seats allocated to winning parties, which allows a larger number of workers with low list placements to enter politics. As a test of theory, I present evidence from a natural experiment on a municipality-level change in electoral formulas, which took place in Italy in 1993. Leveraging a reverse difference-in-discontinuities design, I find that the bonus improved working class representation in municipal councils, without distorting winning party votes shares, or electoral turnout---and in spite of having mainly benefited mainstream right-of-center parties, that have minimal incentives to cater to the working class vote.

Recent work suggests that parties have become more likely to nominate under-represented minority candidates in efforts to appeal to growing immigrant-origin electorates. Most directly, the introduction of non-citizen voting right policies contribute to this boost in immigrant descriptive representation. But how does this ethnic diversification of political candidates affect the gender composition of party lists? Existing work on the intersectionality of immigrant and gender representation and the spill-over effects of policies boosting one marginalized group to another provide diverging expectations. Evaluating this question, we investigate how the introduction of non-citizen voting rights affected the intersectional representation of women and immigrants in Swiss municipal politics. For this, we analyze novel data on the gender and immigration backgrounds of political candidates in the Canton of Geneva. Early results suggest that the policy led to the increased presence of both male and female immigrant-origin candidates on party lists at the expense of mainly male native candidates. These preliminary findings suggest that non-citizen voting rights do not only enhance immigrant political representation but also promote female candidacy.