I am a Reader in Comparative Politics at King’s College London.
My research focuses on elections and political institutions in both emerging and well-established democracies.
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PUBLICATIONS
ARTICLES
2021. Financial Bailouts and the decline of establishment politics. Electoral Studies, (forthcoming)
2020. The Costs of Responsibility for the Political Establishment of the Eurozone (1999-2015). (with Sonia Alonso) Party Politics, 26(3) 317-333.
2020. The effect of alternation in power on electoral intimidation in democratizing regimes. (with Sarah Birch) Journal of Peace Research, 57(1) 126-139.
2018. Tying Incumbents’ Hands: The Effects of Election Monitoring on Electoral Outcomes. (with Nasos Roussias) Electoral Studies, 54 (August) 116-127.
Winner of the Lawerence Longley Award to Best Article 2018. APSA Representation and Electoral Systems section.
2018. When do electoral institutions trigger electoral misconduct? Democratization 25 (2):331-50.
2017. Democracy without Choice: Citizens’ perceptions of government’s autonomy during the Euro-zone crisis. (with Sonia Alonso) European Journal of Political Research, 56 (2) 230-245.
2013. Satisfaction with Democracy in Multi-ethnic Countries - The Effect of Representative Political Institutions on Ethnic Minorities. Political Studies, 61 (1) 101-118.
2011. Characterizing electoral systems. An empirical application of aggregated threshold functions. West European Politics, 34(2) 256-281.
2008. The parliamentary election in Armenia, May 2007. Electoral Studies, 27 (2) 369-372.
2007. Exploring political representation and ethnic conflict in new democracies. (with Sonia Alonso) European Journal of Political Research, 46(2) 237-267.
2007. Aggregated threshold functions or how to measure the performance of an electoral system. Electoral Studies, 26 (2) 492-502.
2005. La caracterización de los sistemas electorales. Una aplicación de las funciones de agregación de umbrales en las nuevas democracias de Europa y América Latina. Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 13. 89-118.
BOOKS
2015. Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions. (co-edited with Jennifer Gandhi) London: Routledge.
CHAPTERS IN EDITED BOOKS
2018. Democracy without Choice: Citizens’ perceptions of government’s autonomy during the Euro-zone crisis (with Sonia Alonso) in Democracy and Crisis: Challenges in Turbulent Times. Wolfgang Merkel and Sascha Kneip (eds.) Cham: Springer.
2015. Ethnicity and Elections in Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions. Jennifer Gandhi and Rubén Ruiz-Rufino (eds.) London: Routledge.
2015. Introduction in Handbook of Comparative Political Institutions. Jennifer Gandhi and Rubén Ruiz- Rufino (eds.) London: Routledge.
2012. Las reglas electorales y sus efectos in Las Elecciones Europeas 2009. Joan Font and Mariano Torcal (eds.). Madrid: CIS.
2003. Representación parlamentaria y conflicto étnico (with Sonia Alonso) in Minorías nacionales y conflicto étnico. Carmen González (ed): Madrid. UNED-Instituto Gutiérrez Mellado.
Ongoing PROJECTS
Democracy under strain. The effects of financial bailouts on citizens and parties (Book project)
This is the most ambitious project I am working on at this moment. The book project originates from a series of articles that I recently published with my co-author Sonia Alonso where we conceive the financial bailouts implemented in some countries during the Euro-crisis as a mechanism to explain the functioning of democracy in hyper-globalized contexts. The book will explore in more detail how bailouts have altered the idea citizens have about the way democracy work; the dilemmas that traditional establishment parties faced when they had to accept and implement such financial relief packages and, finally, the electoral consequences for these parties after supporting and implementing financial bailout. The book will make use of several datasets including a large dataset covering individual data form all Eurozone member states since 2001 and a second dataset with data aggregated for each election year.
Adverse economic shocks, monetary integration and the fragmentation of electoral competition. (Paper)
The financial crisis observed in the European Monetary Union (EMU) between 2010 and 2015 brought about relevant political changes. In some countries, such changes altered consolidated institutional equilibria with regard to political representation. Focusing on cross-country variations of electoral fragmentation between 1946 and 2020, this article analyses how exposure to financial crises and financial assistance explain the stability of electoral competition. Using pooled and difference-in-difference analyses, the main finding of this research shows that exposure to economic shocks results in more electoral fragmentation only when nation-states lose much of their decision-making power to use local knowledge to identify and adopt suitable economic policies to face economic adversities. The events unfolding in the EMU during the Eurocrisis illustrate this mechanism where countries that were financially bailout experienced dramatic political changes compared to not only other EMU members-states but also to non-EMU countries which too received assistance during the same period. You can download the article here and the appendix here.
Labour-intensive dual markets and support for radical-right parties. (Paper)
This article shows how exposure to labour-intensive economic activities that are performed in strongly dual labour-markets explains support for radical-right parties. These distinct economic settings are characterised not only by contractual inequalities but also by allocating fixed-term workers to perform the most labour-demanding tasks. This dynamic reinforces existing conditions that favour support for radical-right platforms. These structural conditions, however, need to be observed in combination with critical junctures that facilitate the entry of these parties into the electoral arena. The article tests these theoretical claims focusing on the rise of radical-right parties in Spain. Using municipal data, the article identifies how exposure to intensive agriculture determines support for these platforms even after controlling for levels of education, immigration and culture. However, it is not after observing the activation of relevant cleavages that a full explanation to understand the electoral success of radical-right parties unfolds. You can download the article here.
The devil is in the detail: The Strategic Adoption of Compulsory Voting in Western Europe – With Ria Ivandic (LSE)
This article argues that the extension of compulsory voting (CV) in Western Europe was an institutional response from old conservative parties to counterbalance the strength of the Left in the early 1900s. However, this institutional move could at first seem paradoxical. Why making the vote compulsory when the Left was mobilised? We argue that once the conservative parties conceded on the Left's demand to extend the suffrage, they use their institutional capacity to make electoral reforms that maximised their survival in power. CV was adopted only when old elites could increase their support by activating idle voters or by co-opting new ones. We test our theory using a cross-national dataset covering parliamentary elections from 1880 to 1939 in Western Europe, a district-level dataset covering the 1892 and 1894 Belgian elections, and a province-level dataset of parliamentary elections in Spain between 1890 and 1920. All our analyses confirm our theoretical claims. You can dowload the article here and the appendix here.
Globalization and support for social-democracy – With Lee Savage (King’s College London)
Has social-democracy lost its capacity to govern? In this project, we analyze a possible mechanism explaining why social-democracy has shifted from being a dominant political platform in the electoral arena to a platform struggling to win elections. Our main argument lies in how social-democratic parties have faced the challenges put forward by globalization. Globalization has implied both an increase of flexibilization of labor markets but also changes in the capacity of governments to determine fiscal and monetary policies. Put together, these two consequences of globalization hit both voters and parties. On the party side, social-democratic platforms like Labour were successful to provide adequate policies to their constituents when they had sufficient control over fiscal tools like taxation and the budget. However, as countries became more interconnected, such control became less clear and social-democratic parties struggled to implement policies similar to those used in the past. This situation put social-democratic parties before the dilemma of abandoning principles of social democracy in order to keep high their electoral chances of victory but at the expense of losing much of its traditional support. On the voters’ side, globalization pushed some individuals to precarious working and living conditions. These voters no longer benefited from policies traditionally delivered by social-democratic parties and, as a consequence, they no longer supported these parties in the elections. We test these theoretical claims using a novel dataset that combines electoral and census data at the district level for all general elections in the United Kingdom since 1945.
Why do electoral observation missions occur? The importance of being trusted – With Nasos Roussias (University of Sheffield)
In the last years, questions dealing with the causes and consequences of fraudulent elections have won popularity among political scientists. Scholars have been focusing on how fraudulent elections affect party systems; have explored how electoral systems account for fraudulent behavior or, under which conditions incumbents decide to commit electoral fraud. However, there has been little attention in exploring why a country would allow a third-party to monitor the elections and, likewise, why an international organization would be interested in deploying a mission to observe such election. In this project, we address this issue by arguing that electoral observation missions (EOMs) are observed when a particular set of conditions are met. EOMs occur in developing countries that need some international branding to improve their economic conditions. Using the trade flows between countries, we hypothesize that one way countries have to show their level of institutional trust is by allowing international organizations to monitor their elections. This decision comes with the cost of reducing the capacity of incumbents to rig the elections which put rulers, especially unpopular ones, in a trade-off between surviving in power and improving economic conditions.
TEACHING
POSTGRADUATE
2018. Elections and Globalization.
2015 - present. Quantitative Methods for Political Economy. MA Political Economy. King’s College London.