Job market candidates 2024 - Subfield: Comparative Politics

My research explores organised crime-related violence, governance, and State-building, with a regional focus on Latin America. In my doctoral dissertation, I seek to explain variation in territorial control in Latin American cities, offering a theoretical framework to account for how and why States are able to build and sustain territorial control in areas dominated by criminal groups. I test my theoretical claims across several empirically rich case studies, drawing on original data gathered through hundreds of research interviews. These were undertaken in six cities from across Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. 

College: Green Templeton College

Thesis Title: “Coercion, Capital, and The Latin American City: Understanding Territorial Control and Governance in Marginalized Urban Communities”.

Supervisor: Professor Timothy Power

As a comparativist, I am interested in political parties and institutional development in post-conflict settings; collective political violence; electoral behaviour; and human rights. My doctoral dissertation explains divergent party building trajectories in the aftermath of Latin American civil wars. It combines theory development with rich empirics based on structured and unstructured data, including thorough analysis of in-depth interviews, archival material, and surveys.

College: Campion Hall

Thesis Title: Designed for War, (Un)Successful in Democracy: Party-Building after Civil Conflict in Latin America

Supervisor: Professor Timothy Power

My research interests lie at the intersection of comparative political economy, political sociology, and political behaviour. In my dissertation, I investigate the increasing significance of political identities in nonpolitical settings across advanced economies, with a particular focus on how these identities shape the behavior of employees and firms. In parallel, I also explore how different fields of university education influence political attitudes and civic behaviors. I study these questions by combining original experimental survey designs, text analysis techniques, and large administrative datasets.

College: Lincoln College

Thesis Title: Politics at Work: How Structural Transformations Shape Employee and Firm Behaviour in Knowledge Economies

Supervisors: Professor Ben Ansell and Professor Jane Gingrich

Key Publications: 

2024, Cornago Bonal, L., & Raffaelli, Do Political Identities Matter at Work? The Politics of Workplace Cooperation

My research interests lie in understanding how individuals think about economic inequality and its sources. I use experimental methods to uncover individuals’ attitudes towards policies that aim at reducing economic inequality such as including immigrants into the welfare state, increasing taxes on the super-rich or decreasing the salary gap between highly and lowly paid occupations. Apart from looking at public support for certain policies, I also explore how individuals justify market inequality in the first place.

College: Lady Margaret Hall

Thesis title: Fairness beliefs and preferences for redistribution.

Supervisors: Professor F David Rueda and Professor Jane Gingrich.

My research seeks to understand why some crisis-hit countries turn to the IMF for assistance, while others do not. To unravel this puzzle, I argue that we must pay attention to how creditors’ ability to withdraw or withhold capital limits governments’ room for manoeuvre and systematically shapes the choice to enter into Fund programs. My work draws on fieldwork research in Ghana, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire, coupled with analysis of original panel data covering IMF conditional lending from 1984–2019.

College: Nuffield College

Thesis Title: When All Else Fails: Borrowing Governments, Structural Power, and the Puzzle of IMF Programme Participation

Supervisors: Professor Ben Ansell and Professor Ricardo Soares de Oliveira

I study individuals’ attitudes on immigration, sexuality, and gender. My research agenda follows three main lines. First, I examine the dimensionality of attitudes, exploring under which conditions some individuals oppose immigration while holding moderate-to-progressive views on issues of traditional morality (“sexually-modern nativism”) and the implications of simultaneously holding both positive and negative views on immigration (“attitudinal ambivalence”). Second, I investigate how these complex attitudes translate into voting behavior, affecting vote choice. Finally, I explore the re-politicization of gender and sexuality issues. In a co-authored project, I advance a conceptualization and measurement of “Wokeness”, framing it as a perspective on social and political inequality.

In parallel, I am a member of the Einstein Research Group, working on a project that examines how political parties mobilize group identities.

Methodologically, I employ surveys, experiments, and other causal inference tools

College: St. Hugh’s 

Thesis Title: Essays on Attitudes on Immigration, Gender, and Sexuality in Europe 

Supervisors: Professor Tarik Abou-Chadi, Spyros Kosmidis, Jane Gingrich

Publications: 

• “Attitudinal Ambivalence towards Multiculturalism” (Under review, Available upon request)
• “From Context to Congruence: Immigration Salience and Voter Socialisation” (with Leonardo Carella, under review, pre-print here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lcp4r9wz4bp5zvhjb5oyd/Immigration_Congruence_1104.pdf?rlkey=8wpd2cp5ueybv0pqjkllymord&e=1&dl=0)
• “Do Political Identities Matter at Work? The Politics of Workplace Cooperation” (with Luis Cornago Bonal, under review, pre-print here: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/j43tn)

My research looks at the effect of social cleavages and identity on political behaviour. In particular, I’m very interested in the role of place-based identities—attachment to where we live—what motivates this on a very local level, and how it affects how we engage in politics, and who we vote for. To study this, I use a range of quantitative methods, including survey experiments, panel studies and very fine-grained contextual data. I am also more broadly interested in studying political attitudes and affect, such as opinions towards climate change, and the role of our perceptual biases in how we form political opinions.

College: St Peter’s College

Thesis Title: Go As We Are: The Politics of Place Attachment

Supervisor: Professor James Tilley

Area: Comparative Government

Key Publications:

Forthcoming. Does regional spending affect support for the European Union? Journal of European Public Policy (w/ James Tilley and Sara Hobolt)

2024. Peoples’ Climate Vote 2024. Geneva: United Nations Development Programme. Available: undp.org/publications/peoples-climate-vote-2024 (w/ Steve Fisher and others)

I explore the role of foreign aid as foreign policy for the U.S. Congress. I develop a new framework for understanding U.S. foreign aid and compile novel data on American foreign assistance to demonstrate the power of Congressional committees in foreign aid allocation.

College: University College

Thesis Title: Foreign Aid as Congressional Foreign Policy

Supervisors: Professor Ben Ansell and Professor Desmond King