Institutions Affect Preferences: The Value of Autonomy Under Liberal and Authoritarian Regimes

Do liberal societies cultivate and sustain the social norms and other preferences required to perpetuate their basic institutions in the long run? To explore the dynamic stability of liberalism as a culture-institutions coevolutionary process, we measure the value of personal autonomy and aversion to being controlled by others, among East Germans raised under Communist rule and East Germans raised in liberal Germany.

The International Transmission of Democratic Values: Evidence from African Migration to Europe

This paper investigates the effect of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in European democratic host countries on support for democracy in African migrants’ origin communities. We propose a novel methodology to estimate migration stocks from sub-national areas of origin to any possible country in the world based on Google trends data. We use these data alongside measures of anti-immigrant sentiment at destination to study origin communities exposure to anti-immigrant sentiment.

Knowledge Suppression and Resilience under Censorship: Three-century Book Publications in China

This study investigates the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts of state censorship on knowledge production, focusing on the largest book banning in Chinese history, triggered by the creation of the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library in Four Sections) during 1772–1783. By analyzing publication data of over 161,000 books spanning from the 1660s to the 1940s, we find that categories subjected to more severe bans experienced a significant decline in publications in the decades following the bans (1780s to 1840s).

A Research Program on COVID-19: Three Examples

The talk is about the research within SWECOV, a large research pogram on the COVID-19 pandemic. The program is built on a rich set of medical, social and economic microdata from Sweden and was started when I served on the Swedish Corona Commission. In the seminar, I will give three examples of concrete projects. The first escribes the inequaltites, along different social gradients, in the medical, social and economic outfalls of the pandemic.

American Life Histories (with D. Lagakos and S. Michalopoulos)

In the late 1930s, a team of writers traveled the United States to record the life stories of thousands of older Americans for posterity. We combine close human readings with text analysis by large-language models (LLMs) to turn these unstructured texts into a rich data set that captures the narrators' experiences, economic fortunes, and perspectives on what brought happiness, satisfaction, and meaning into their lives. We first demonstrate that, under the right circumstances, LLMs can detect and analyse factual information in this corpus in a comparable way to human readers.

Black Empowerment and White Mobilization: The Effects of the Voting Rights Act (with G. Facchini, M. Tabellini, and C. Testa)

How did southern whites respond to the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA)? Leveraging newly digitized data on county-level voter registration by race between 1956 and 1980, and exploiting pre-determined variation in exposure to the federal intervention, we document that the VRA increases both Black and white political participation. Consistent with the VRA triggering white counter-mobilization, the surge in white registrations is concentrated in counties where African Americans represent a political threat.

Luis Prenninger

I'm a second-year MPhil candidate in Politics (Political Theory). My thesis is in social metaphysics, focusing on epistemological issues in the social construction of gender and the sex/gender distinction in Sally Haslanger’s work.

In 2025/26, I will be co-convening the Oxford Workshop on Work in Progress in Political Theory (OWIPT). I also serve as Section Editor (Culture and Ideas) for the Oxford Political Review.

Jacob Hougie

I'm a first-year MPhil in Political Theory, based at Worcester College. My interests lie across a broad range of political theory, but particularly with communitarian and realist critiques of liberalism and their underlying philosophical principles.

Before coming to Oxford, I studied Human, Social and Political Science at the University of Cambridge. There, I focused on the History of Political Thought and worked on applying the historical method to the work of Jonathan Sacks for the first time.

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