Projects & Work in Progress

In our Project, Politicians, Policies and the Reproduction of Wealth, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and in collaboration with the Universities of Marburg (Eva Wegner and Miquel Pellicer), Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil (Rachel Pimenta) and the University of Capetown, South Africa (Vimal Ranchhod), we study the role of politician characteristics for developing policies that may systematically favor the wealthy. Our key questions are: How well do politicians’ social and economic characteristics align with those of economic elites? How does this affect policy making? What are the consequences for the incomes of the wealthy? Answering these questions will bring crucial insights into the political mechanisms behind the reproduction of wealth. It will also provide tools and solid empirical evidence for the public to either hold politicians accountable or increase citizen trust in them if warranted by the evidence.

We follow two broad empirical approaches. First, for 50 democracies, we collect and analyze data on economic and finance minister characteristics and wealth-relevant policies between 2005-2020. Second, we undertake in-depth case studies for four countries (the UK, Germany, Brazil, and South Africa) in the same period. In these case studies we 1. collect systematic data on MPs’ social and economic characteristics, 2. study in-depth the characteristics of particularly relevant politicians, 3. track the trajectories of policies from their inception to their adoption, recording the role and policy positions of individual politicians, and 4. analyze the implications of these policies for top incomes. We use a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches which allows us to track the whole mechanism from politician characteristics to the proposed and adopted policies and thereby to the incomes of the wealthy.

In related prior work, presented in the working paper "Revolving door politics and income inequality", I find that finance ministers with a professional background in the banking and financial sectors are associated with cuts in capital taxes. 

In the project economic and political inequality I investigate the changes in the educational and professional backgrounds of politicians and how these changes affect representation and policy. In "Cabinet Ministers and Inequality" published in the European Journal of Political Research, I show that the class composition of parliamentary cabinets predicts the generosity of social welfare benefits but also how responsive governments are to the welfare preferences of citizens. In a nutshell governments that have more sociocultural professionals are a lot more generous that governments that have a higher number of liberal professionals holding ministerial portfolios. 

In the working paper "Revolving door politics and income inequality", I investigate whether finance ministers with a background in the financial sector are more likely to lower taxes and lead to higher income inequality. 

In the "Ideologues, Partisans and Loyalists: Cabinet Ministers and Social Welfare Reform in Parliamentary Democracies", published in Comparative Political Studies, I find that the political and professional background of social welfare ministers predict changes in welfare insurance generosity more than party ideology or party platforms. The policy role of cabinet ministers is further generalised in my book, Ideologues, Partisans and Loyalists, published by Oxford University Press where I also investigate the portfolio of Employment and I undertake in-depth case studies in Ireland, the Netherlands and Greece. There I show that ministers' background and political clout are both strong predictors of policy change. 

How does international trade affect the welfare of local communities and citizens' political attitudes in the UK and in Europe? The study of globalization’s effects currently emphasizes aggregate outcomes at the national and international level, with relatively limited attention paid to the local level, where daily life is experienced and where politics begins. To build a better future and respond to globalization’s critics, the local costs and benefits of globalization must be understood and communicated. Equipped with this information, our leaders can enact precise policies that ameliorate costs from global competition without dismantling the beneficial features of our global economic system.

Together with Professor Thomas Sattler from the University of Geneva, we are collecting data, initially for the UK and eventually for a number of West and East European countries to answer this important question. Our project is part of a larger effort under the Lab for Globalization and Shared Prosperity, led by Professor Nita Rudra at Georgetown University. The Lab bridges theory and practice by actively communicating key results and recommendations to policymakers and the public. Through accessible online resources that detail the effects of globalization and social investment in local contexts and partnerships with leaders at all levels of government, the Lab will work to reshape the public conversation around globalization and advance policies that lead to shared prosperity.

Countries across the globe are called to achieve net-zero within the next three decades. For this, they are expected to decarbonise their economies at faster rates than any country has done before (IPCC Synthesis Report 2023). Yet we have incomplete understanding of how government-led decarbonisation affects communities in the medium to long-term. To what extent will ‘forced’ closures of fossil fuel industries result in a political backlash against a green transition? Does it affect citizen attitudes towards governments’ environmental policies? Does it affect citizens’ trust in political representation and institutions, more broadly? If so, how?

To address these questions, together with Professor Aklin at the the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Professor Bayer at the University of Glasgow and Dr Brandenburg at the University of Strathclyde, we are studying the long-term political effects of the closure of coal mines in towns and cities in Great Britain and Germany. Understanding how the closure of coal mines affects towns and their residents is essential for designing appropriate policy interventions that not only target the decarbonisation of our economies but, crucially, garner bi-partisan public support. 

Over fifty million people in the European Union are energy poor according to the European Commission.  Energy poverty, defined as the inability to attain materially necessitated domestic energy services that ensure the wellbeing of a household, is a major social problem that aggravates health and environmental inequalities. It is associated with poor physical and mental health, such as excess winter deaths, respiratory illnesses, stress, anxiety, and depression. Also, it reduces governments’ capacity to meet their environmental targets. Yet energy poverty is a complex problem that requires coordinated action, as it is affected by a plethora of factors including income, housing conditions and energy prices. Together with Prof. Michael Aklin at the University of Pittsburgh, we collected data on the organisation of the ministerial departments of energy and environment to evaluate how governments coordinate (or not) across different policy areas to address energy inequalities and energy poverty.
We advance the hypothesis that governments can most effectively address energy poverty (and in turn health and environmental inequalities) when energy and environment policies are coordinated at the ministerial level. In our working paper, Policy Coordination and Energy Efficiency", we find that where the department of energy is together with the department of environment, energy consumption in buildings is lower than when energy is under Business or Economics. Further, when the portfolio of energy is a sub-portfolio under another department, there are fewer policy laws targeting energy efficiency.  This project has been funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme small grants. 

Economic and political crises have deep effects on societies and their political systems. In the project Technocrats and Economic Policy, I investigate the role of technocrat finance ministers in democracies. I start by reviewing the literature and defining technocrats and technocrats in the article "Technocratic Government and Economic Policy" published by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. I investigate the policy impact of technocrat finance and social welfare ministers in "Technocrats in Cabinets and Their Policy Effects" published in "The Technocratic Challenge to Democracy", edited by Eri Bertsou and Daniele Caramani. 

In "When Technocratic Appointments signal Credibility", forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies, we show that international markets reward the appointments of technocrats during financial crises by lowering the borrowing costs of crises-hit governments when they appoint technocrats to the top economic portfolio (for a visual, click here). These findings complement our article "Commitment or Expertise:?Technocratic Appointments as Responses to Economic Crises", published in the European Journal of Political Research, where we find that technocrats are more likely to be appointed during financial crises, primarily in political systems where voters can directly reward and punish politicians through a personal vote. Finally, in the working paper "Who’s to blame? How financial crises and technocrats change (or not) the welfare state in Europe",  I empirically investigate through mediation analysis the extent to which financial crises or/and the appointments of technocrats are responsible for the retrenchment of the welfare state in West European democracies. 

 In the article “In Search of Successful Reform: The Politics of Opposition and Consensus in OECD Parliamentary Democracies,” published in West European Politics, I address the puzzle that although economists predict than single-party majority cabinets are the best type of government to enact policy reform, the countries that enacted the most politically controversial reforms in the 1980s and 1990s  have been typically governed by large multiparty cabinets or small minorities. Going beyond theories of corporatist economic organization, I advance the argument that governments are more successful in pushing forward with politically controversial reforms when they can co-opt opposition parties and isolate militant trade unions. 

In the article “Finding Political Capital for Monetary Tightening: Unemployment Insurance and Partisan Monetary Cycles,” published in the European Journal of Political Research I resolve the puzzle that while partisan theories predict that left parties are hurt electorally during periods of monetary stabilization, there is no empirical evidence of partisan monetary cycles. I show that partisan monetary cycles exist, but only when unemployment insurance is low. When unemployment benefits are low and of short duration, Social Democratic parties are less aggressive in their resolve to stabilize inflation. 

Voters have increasingly turned against career politicians and prefer more political outsiders to represent them. In the project the "Professionalisation of politics", I investigate this process through the collection of data on the background of politicians across 18 parliamentary democracies during the last sixty years. In the working paper "Professionalisation and Expertise in Parliamentary Cabinets", I show that the number of professional politicians has increased substantially since the eighties and that the biggest shift has happened within Social-democratic parties where professional politicians have replaced working class politicians. In other projects, I look into the effects of political trust and income inequality in the election of outsider politicians and politicians with a background in Business. 

Expanding on this work, we link legislative institutions with politicians' expertise, as measured by their legislative speeches and professional background. In our working paper "The Institutional Foundations of Legislative Expertise" with David Fortunato at UCSD, we show that MPs are more likely to have policy specialisation in strong legislatures.

In a related project, we link intra-party politics with cabinet appointments. In two separate working papers "The party on the ground and in government", and "Appointing ministers in multiparty governments", we show that intra-party divisions directly impact government formation. Building on these works, we are investigating how government composition affects party changes and in turn, intra-party conflict affect governance. 

 In our article “Platforms, Portfolios, Policy: How Audience Costs Affect Social Welfare Policy in Multiparty Cabinets,”  published in the journal Political Science Research and Methods we explain an empirical puzzle in the literature: if clarity of responsibility is low in multiparty cabinets, why do parties  follow through with their promises? We advance a novel theory, which provides the conditions under which political parties can bargain for their preferred policy.  Political parties have more bargaining power when they face high audience costs for failing to deliver on their electoral promises. These costs increase with the control of the relevant portfolio, the strength of the policy commitment, and the saliency of the policy issue to party voters. Specifically, we find that Social democratic parties can defend and even advance welfare benefits as long as they have made a strong pledge, control the portfolio of social affairs and are not constrained by a finance minister whose party has pledged to cut down benefits.