Rubén Ruiz-Rufino
Rubén Ruiz-Rufino
Political Scientist
 

I am a Reader in Comparative Politics at King’s College London.

My research focuses on elections and political institutions in both emerging and established democracies.

Contact me:

 
 

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PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

ARTICLES

CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS

 
 

 

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Ongoing PROJECTS

  • Economic Crisis Management and Trust in the EU. A Quasi-Experimental Approach. (with Lea Heyne) Accepted by Cambridge University Press, Elements in European Politics.

    Our project examines how different economic crisis management strategies implemented at different times across the European Union (EU) have affected levels of trust in the EU. In addressing this question, our proposed Element seeks to make novel contributions both at the theoretical and empirical levels.

    Theoretically, our projects starts by proposing that changes in citizens' trust in the European supranational project are driven by how the management of bad economic performance affects the balance of political representation between national and supranational actors. To develop this idea, we first characterise spells of economic decline within the EU around two dimensions: the extension of the economic shock and the scope of the economic recovery policy.

    Borrowing from the macroeconomic literature, extension refers to symmetric and symmetric economic shocks. The former is observed depending on country-specific factors whereas the former is used to identify adverse common economic shocks that affects all EU countries in a comparable way. The extent of a crisis is supplemented by the scope of remedial instruments. In this sense, we differentiate between ordinary and extraordinary adjustments. Economic recovery instruments resulting from previous collective negotiations which are designed to be implemented in the presence of bad economic performance are labelled as ordinary adjustments. One example is the initiation of the Excessive Deficit Procedure. There are occasions, however, when these ordinary arrangements are insufficient and new instruments are needed. These are extraordinary adjustments in the sense that they deviate from policies existing in ordinary ones. The financial facilities included in such extraordinary adjustments range from involving third-party financial institutions that typically impose policy conditionality in return of assistance, such as the IMF, to creating new supranational cooperative schemes where preferences of national governments and priorities of the EU converge.

    When combining these two dimensions, a 2x2 matrix originates that characterises different approaches towards crisis management observed within the EU. Our study shows that shifts in levels of EU trust are successfully explained when this typology is considered. In the presence of ordinary adjustments, positive shifts are expected when common shocks are handled by existing ad-hoc institution, however, no attitudinal shift would take place when asymmetric shocks are managed by country-specific supranational corrective mechanisms. We test these claims by examining announcements made by the ECB in 2023 to increase interest rates to combat the cost-of-living crisis and the decisions of the European Commission to initiate EDP in 2004/5 in countries deviating from the Stability and Growth Pact criterion, respectively.

    The largest shifts in levels of EU trust are, however, expected following the management of shocks that require extraordinary adjustments. Our theoretical characterisation shows that convergence adjustments are observed when shocks are symmetric, however, in the presence of asymmetric, country-specific ones imposed recovery packages are used. We argue that convergence policies should largely increase levels of EU trust while imposed recovery packages would produce the opposite effect. We use the announcement of the Recovery and Resilience Facility in 2020 and the announcement of the Portuguese financial bailout in 2011 to test these claims.

    Our empirical tests use quasi-experimental techniques involving diff-in-diff modelling and exploiting key relevant events that facilitate the implementation of Unexpected Event during Survey Design (UESD). All our analysis use Eurobarometer data and cover individuals from countries that are part of the Economic Monetary Union since 1999. Our analyses robustly confirm all of our theoretical claims.

  • When is a democracy under strain?

    Why does external financial support erode democratic satisfaction in some countries but leave it intact in others? This article argues that the answer lies in the depth of supranational economic integration. Where integration is limited, conditionality releases information about government performance: elections retain their accountability function and democratic satisfaction remains stable or recovers. Where integration is deep, conditionality releases systemic information: citizens learn that elections are uninformative about future policy direction, and satisfaction falls. This integration gradient hypothesis predicts that the sign, magnitude, and mechanism of conditionality's democratic effects vary continuously with integration depth. Across five cases spanning the continuum --- Colombia and South Korea at the low-integration pole, Hungary at an intermediate position, and the Eurozone and Portugal at the high-integration pole --- the evidence is consistent with the gradient. What appears as contradictory evidence in the literature is the theoretically predicted pattern of a single mechanism at different integration positions.

  • Programmatic choice under EU economic constraints: A conjoint experiment in Germany and Portugal (with Lea Heyne and Roberto Pannico)

    With European integration, the menu of national economic policies has become increasingly limited, especially within the EMU, where member states have ceded control over macroeconomic and monetary instruments. Such economic policy concessions generate a tension between delivering popularly responsive and institutional responsible policies. Yet few studies have experimentally examined how supranational restrictions affect electoral behaviour. Using a conjoint experiment, we test two different theories on how EU economic constraints shape electoral choices. We find no support for the balancing demands theory, which suggests economic policy relevance declines while non-economic issues gain salience under constrained governments. Instead, we find strong evidence for the viability theory in which voters evaluate economic policies not only by content but also by compliance with supranational commitments. Voters prospectively assess policy viability and penalize parties proposing non-viable options. This mechanism is especially pronounced among individuals with higher cognitive skills and stronger support for EU integration.

  • Mitigating economic deprivation? NextGeneration EU funds and radical-right vote (with Lea Heyne)

    The growing electoral success of radical-right parties has become a defining feature of contemporary European democracies. In this context, current debates around “left-behind regions” and the “geography of discontent” have specifically focused on the economic characteristics of places with high radical-right support. This paper wants to investigate how the reception of large-scale EU funds through the NextGenerationEU programme has affected radical right vote, using data from over 3000 Portuguese parishes.

    Portugal experienced high levels of economic vulnerability following the 2010 economic crisis, especially in interior and southern regions. Since 2019, the rise of the radical right party Chega has put an end to the believe that the country was "immune" to the radical right due to its association with the authoritarian past. We argue that the massive inflow of EU funding into local projects through the Recovery and Resilience Fund has the potential to mitigate local-level discontent and to reduce radical-right vote shares, especially in highly vulnerable areas.

    We use fine-grained geographical data from Portugal to test the impact of receiving EU funds on radical right vote under different levels of economic vulnerability. Our unique dataset combines data on the projects that were implemented and funded through Portugal's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRR) with electoral and economic data from 3091 Portuguese parishes (freguesias), the smallest administrative division of the country. The Portuguese PRR programme amounts to approximately 13.9 billion euros in grants and 2.7 billion euros in loans and will remain in effect between 2021 and 2026. In order to estimate the causal effect of receiving large EU funds on parish-level voting behaviour, we employ a difference-in difference approach where we compare parishes that have received PRR funded projects with parishes that did not receive such projects.

 
 

 

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TEACHING

UNDERGRADUATE

  • 2020-present. Introduction to Comparative Politics. King’s College London (syllabus)

  • 2013 - 2024. Institutions, Economics and Change. King’s College London (syllabus)

  • 2015 - 2019. Statistics for Political Science I. King’s College London (syllabus)

  • 2014-2016. Failed Regimes, Elections and Fraud. King’s College London (syllabus)

POSTGRADUATE

  • 2015 - 2024. Quantitative Methods for Political Economy. MA Political Economy. King’s College London. (syllabus)

  • 2018. Elections and Globalization. (syllabus)