The COVID-19 pandemic is the most severe crisis many Western societies have faced since the 2nd World War. In the very early days of the pandemic, I became director of a large-scale social science project to understand how the pandemic influenced Western democracies, which simultaneously gained a prominent role in the Danish government and media response.

The next session in DPIR’s Alumni Career Conversation series will focus on careers in the civil service, with guest speaker and DPIR and St Catz alumnus Rupert McNeil (1985, PPE), formerly the UK’s Government Chief People Officer (2016-2022). This will be a hybrid event, hosted jointly by DPIR and St Catz, and will take place in the Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre at St Catz and online via Zoom on Wednesday 26 October, 13:00-14:00.

Theories of democratic governance assume that citizens reward or punish politicians for their performance in providing public services. This study expands the existing debate by shifting the focus to subnational heterogeneities in electoral returns to government performance. I introduce a theory suggesting that electoral returns to local public goods will increase with their excludability, i.e., the degree to which they are used only by the local population, because due to their excludability, the local population will see them as `club goods' and as a signal of favoritism.

Research so far has predominantly focused on identifying the types of refugees that citizens across the EU and the US are more likely to welcome. While this work has helped us to uncover patterns of discrimination towards outgroup members, it has failed to inform us what kind of refugee policy is most likely to gain support. Our project addresses this shortcoming by focusing on what refugee policy Europeans want. We study attitudes in respect to the EU-level allocational regime for the refugees, level of border control, right to work, freedom of movement and the cost of the policy.

(co-authored with Jeremy Ferwerda)

Investing in state capacity presents a dilemma to politicians in developing democracies. While increased capacity can facilitate social and economic advancement, steps that enhance state capacity often result in decreased bureaucratic loyalty. Decreased loyalty can constrain politicians’ ability to use the state to satisfy their personal and political goals. Faced with the above dilemma, I argue that politicians engage in a mixed strategy in which they invest in bureaucratic capacity while retaining tools to enforce (individual) bureaucratic loyalty when needed.

How do levels of cognitive household labor -- the ``mental load'' involved in anticipating, fulfilling, and monitoring household needs -- affect political engagement? The mental load is distinct from the physical tasks of e.g., cooking and cleaning, and thought to be disproportionately undertaken by women. Thus far, the few studies addressing the issue have used qualitative methods to document it, and the topic has yet to be studied in political science research. As a result, we may be underestimating household gender gaps and their impact on politics.

istorical IR scholarship increasingly treats the second half of the nineteenth century as a time of transformation. Growing “interaction capacity” spurred new patterns of international organization and international law amidst inter-imperial cooperation and competition. Though it has received little attention in Historical IR, Mexico was at the centre of these occurrences – not only as a victim of imperial aggression but an active proponent of alternative visions of liberal and republican international order. From 1859 to 1867, the country saw a major debt crisis and a related intervention.

The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the U.S. has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of democratic performance from 2000 to 2018, we develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index.