Ongoing PROJECTS

• Contextual determinants of radical-right electoral strongholds. (Paper)

  This article claims that the observation of radical-right electoral strongholds can be explained by contextual, in addition to, individual factors. Focusing on the type of industry where individuals work and socially interact two claims are made. Firstly, compared to knowledge-based industries, labour-intensive activities are characterised by clustering individuals with high levels of job vulnerability and low levels of education. Secondly, when jointly observed, these two socio-economic characteristics explain the development, and expression, of nativist preferences and exclusionary attitudes which drive support for radical-right parties. These claims are tested using two different datasets. Survey data from 17 European democracies are used to test how working in labour-intensive industries exacerbate the role of job vulnerability and education on preference formation, and partisan expression. Such empirical regularities are illustrated at the macro-level by showing how municipalities exposed to labour-intensive economies like certain forms of agriculture, or tourism, determines support for radical-right parties in Spain. You can download the article here and the supplementary material 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.