I am currently working on three projects. They are briefly described below.

Dissertation project: Risk Inequality. Social Policy and Polarization by Popular Demand

My dissertation offers a micro-founded account of social policy outputs and political polarization in rich democracies. It explores the determinants of social policy preferences and the impact of public opinion on political outcomes. By doing so it combines the usually disjoint literatures of the comparative political economy of industrialized countries and the behavioral research tradition.

Building on the social insurance literature, the key argument at the micro-level is that income as well as the uncertainty of income ('risk exposure') meaningfully shape social policy and partisan preferences. Due to their importance as explanatory variables, it is of central interest to explore the joint distribution of income and risk exposure. Just like income inequality, 'risk inequality' (the distribution of risk exposure across the income scale) has important political consequences. Differences in social policy generosity across countries can be explained by differences in the risk exposure of the middle class. Differences in political polarization can be explained by the distribution of risk exposure across the whole income scale.

(If you are interested in a detailed outline with a short description of each chapter, please email me).

Book project with Herbert Kitschelt

Why are some parties systematically more successful in attracting votes and participating in governments than others? Our answer to this question is that parties have chosen different strategies to cope with societal changes (such as structural and demographic changes or the feminization of the workforce). Parties have been more or less successful in keeping a balance of old and new constituencies and in reconciling diverse voter interests.

Our explanation begins with voters and their preferences. We contend and show that the politically relevant space is two-dimensional (as argued in Kitschelt's previous work), and develop a theory of preference formation regarding these two dimensions. We divide the universe of citizens into a handful of 'socio-economic groups' with predictable preference profiles. Differences in preferences, we argue (chapter 1) and show (chapter 2), stem from different positions in the labor market, the family (gender!) and varying degrees of associational membership and mobilization. Unions and churches are particularly important in this process (chapter 3).

Different policy attitudes translate into different vote choices (chapter 4). How parties manage to appeal to voters' policy preferences, then, will have an effect on how successful they will be at the voting booth. For example, the challenge for left parties is to appeal to the growing number of 'socio-cultural professionals' with moderate redistributional but very liberal libertarian preferences (the 'new left') and to 'blue-collar workers' (the 'old left') with extreme redistributional but moderate or even conservative libertarian preferences at the same time

Differences in terms of parties' success in gaining support from each of the socio-economic groups are described and explained in chapter 5. Here we bring in the supply side: The strategic configuration of parties, steeped in past rounds of competition and the reputations parties have earned and the alignments they have built in the past, shapes parties' abilities to modify their electoral support coalitions now. Whether blue-collar workers stay with the left (say, a social democratic party) or whether they 'defect' to a more central party (say, a Christian Democratic party) depends on how sharp these parties distinguish themselves on the two policy dimensions, and how many parties compete. The Left as a whole, we argue, is more successful when it is divided into a moderate social democratic left and new left-libertarian or straight radical socialist parties. This 'product differentiation' is better to cater toward the diverse socio-economic groups that are potential left voters. The empirical evidence in this chapter shows that our model is quite successful in predicting electoral failure and success of parties.

Project on labor market dynamics

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of labor markets and their dynamics for understanding important political phenomena (preferences formation, inequality, etc.). I am interested in systematically studying question like: is it good or bad jobs that are created, and how and why does this differ across countries? Why are some countries more successful in managing the transition from the manufacturing to the service sector age? What do different patterns of job growth and different paths of modernization mean for income mobility?

So far, I have devoted only little time for thinking about and working on this agenda. However, I find interesting and puzzling patterns of job growth in European countries, as reported in a paper called "The Dwindling Middle: Patterns of Job Growth in the EU" (presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, April, 2007, with John Boy). Extending recent work in sociology (Erik Olin Wright and Rachel Dwyer) and economics (David Autor and Lawrence Katz, Mateen Goos and Alan Manning) on the U.S. to European countries, the paper explores whether it is good or bad jobs that grow in boom times (in the U.S., it is god and bad jobs that grow, while medium jobs disappear). It turns out that roughly half of the 15 European countries studied show a pattern similar o the U.S., while the other half shows a clear pattern of upgrading (good jobs grow at disproportionally high rates). How these countries cluster together, however, is not how most scholars would expect them to.