The Comparative Politics Seminar Series in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute is a venue for the presentation of work in progress by scholars from across the subfield of comparative politics.
It usually takes place on Thursdays from 17:00 to 18:30 at Seminar Room 2, in Badia Fiesolana (Fiesole). See below or sync the calendar for the exact location for each meeting. See previous events.
The series is organized by Elias Dinas, Simon Hix, Filip Kostelka, Kevin Munger and Tasha Fairfield with support by Fabian Pawelczyk and Raluca Toma.
Thursday 22 October 2026 | Seminar Room 2
Surviving Exile through Protest
Why do political exiles persist in activism despite uncertain prospects for success, limited expressive benefits, and the profound costs of forced displacement? I argue that exile activism is best understood through the psychology of survival. Exile constitutes a traumatic rupture that threatens activists’ core identities and continued participation enables the preservation of those identities through two processes: enactment, in which exiles inhabit identities by performing familiar practices, and social recognition, in which relevant audiences affirm that performance. I develop this argument through an ethnographically informed study of Egyptian political exile after the 2013 coup. The presentation will focus on the book’s theory and an empirical chapter examining exile protests. Interviews demonstrate that activists continue protesting in exile primarily to sustain their identities as opposition. Analysis of an original dataset of nearly four hundred exile protests across the book’s four main cases shows observable characteristics of protest (location, topic, and partisanship) primarily reflect efforts to seek recognition from specific audiences within the broader Egyptian opposition.
Thursday 29 October 2026 | Sala del Capitolo
What’s in a Cue? Party Reputations, Policy Substance, and the Meaning of Party Cue Effects
Citizens are often blamed for adopting their party’s stance without considering policy substance. Yet existing research has neglected how party cues shape what citizens are judging. We argue that citizens use party cues to make inferences about policy substance by drawing on a party’s policy reputation—shared knowledge of what the party stands for and whom it represents. In six experiments from the United States and Denmark, we find that switching the party sponsor of a policy consistently changes what citizens believe the policy will do and whom it will benefit. These inferences align with a party’s reputation in a given issue domain, deepen with prior knowledge, change similarly across partisan groups and vary with policy opinions. Our findings support a reputational theory of party cues, suggesting that citizens’ responses to party cues are more policy-driven than extant research recognizes.
Thursday 05 November 2026 | Seminar Room 3
Policy Diffusion in the Administrative State
Government agencies exercise substantial public authority, yet agency creation of policy generally occurs outside of the public’s view. We consider one way that agencies may generate policies: by drawing on the actions of other agencies within the government. Utilizing theoretical concepts from the policy diffusion literature, we outline a series of mechanisms by which policies might diffuse from one agency to another. We then test our arguments using data on regulatory paragraphs written in US federal agencies from 2001 to 2020. Our results show that agencies copy regulatory language when they have low policymaking capacity, when a peer agency is particularly innovative, when they are embedded in a similar network with another agency, and when the president has made an issue more salient. Our findings provide new insights into agency policymaking, while also identifying a new frontier for scholars of policy diffusion.
Thursday 12 November 2026 | Seminar Room 2
Exceptional Nation: Populism, Human Capital, and Argentina’s Long-Run Economic Decline
Argentina’s long-run economic decline has puzzled social scientists for decades. While the macroeconomic roots of this decline have received extensive attention, this project considers an underexplored explanation: the political economy of education policies, given the importance of human capital for sustained economic development. Using original data on curriculum and teacher policies from 1870 to 2015, I document three critical junctures between 1947 and 1954, all during Perón’s administration: (1) the national curriculum drastically reduced its emphasis on teaching productivity-enhancing math and science skills in favor of teaching moral values; (2) entry into the teaching profession became less selective and less meritocratic; and (3) teacher salaries plummeted, reducing the attractiveness of the profession for members of the middle and upper classes. A new measure of education quality, also constructed from 1870 to 2015, provides additional evidence that Argentina’s human capital stagnation began during Perón’s administration. Drawing on qualitative evidence and text analysis of primary sources, I argue that Perón’s effort to build working-class support led him to reform the curriculum and reshape teaching as a source of patronage, lowering entry standards and salaries in ways that, contrary to his stated egalitarian commitments, persistently reduced the quality of primary education.
Thursday 19 November 2026 | Seminar Room 2
Green Collars at the Voting Booth: Material Interest and Environmental Voting
We study how occupation-related material interest affects environmental voting. Specifically, material interest hinges on the greenness vs. brownness of individual occupational profiles. That is, on the extent to which individuals are expected to benefit vs. lose in a greener economy. We employ individual-level data from 14 western European countries, over 2010-2019. To measure the greenness and brownness of occupational profiles, for each individual we compute predicted greenness and brownness scores based on the predicted probabilities to be employed in each possible occupation. These probabilities are combined with occupation-specific greenness and brownness scores. Individuals characterized by higher predicted brownness are less likely to vote for Green parties and for parties with a more environmentalist agenda, while the opposite holds for individuals characterized by higher predicted greenness. Voting preferences of brown profiles tend to converge towards those of greener profiles in regions that are better placed to gain from the green transition.
Thursday 26 November 2026 | Seminar Room 2
Winner Gains, Loser Losses, and the Peacefulness of Government Transitions: Mexico Under the PRI Regime
The theory of political transitions tells us that limited losses for losers contributes to the likelihood of a peaceful translation. Are losses for losers indeed limited in authoritarian cases with a large number of peaceful transitions of power. In this paper we study the case of Mexico under the PRI regime, which experienced a remarkable (for an authoritarian setting) seventy year sequence of peaceful sexennial transitions of power. Not a single transition was violently contested. With a comparison of close winners and losers we find, in line with theory, that the gains from a network connection to the winner (the candidate who receives the “dedazo”) were both small and short lived.
Thursday 28 January 2027 | Room TBC
Broadening the Recipe to Strengthen Democracy
Deep concerns about the ability of democracies to cope with polarization, political violence, and anti-democratic attitudes have motivated social scientists to develop interventions that strengthen democracy. The emerging evidence base has impact on policy globally but is predominantly based on American findings. To strengthen democracies, we need a broader evidence base. To this end, we conducted an intervention tournament (14 interventions, 23,146 participants) in a very different democracy – the Netherlands. Some successful interventions in the US replicate, with others failing to replicate. We identify a newly constructed narrative-based intervention as the most successful in strengthening democracy. By developing a theoretical framework to compare interventions and innovations in our research design we lay the groundwork for a global intervention tournament.