Biography

Rubén Ruiz-Rufino (Granada, 1975) finished his LL.B at the University of Granada (Spain) in 1998 after spent a year at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and Edinburgh (U.K.). In 1999, he finished a M.Sc. in Social and Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. He became a member of the Juan March Institute (CEACS) in 1999 and finished the M.A. in 2001. Between 2003 and 2005, he was a visiting student in the Department of Politics of the New York University (NYU) where he wrote most of his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Adam Przeworski. He defended his Ph.D. dissertation ""Aggregated Threshold Functions. A Characterization of the World Electoral Systems between 1945-2000" in June 2005. He is a Doctor-Member of the CEACS. He has taught political sciences at the University of Saint Louis in Madrid and Universidad Complutense and between 2007 and 2008 he held a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He is currently a Juan de la Cierva fellow at the Institute of Public and Political Goods (IPP) an institution which is dependent on the CSIC, the largest public research institution in Spain.
He has two related research areas. On the one hand, part of his research deals with political institutions like electoral systems. In this sense, part of his work is devoted to understand how these institutions work and how they can be compared. Some of his findings have been published in journals like Electoral Studies.
On the other hand, he also focuses on how political institutions that grant political representation to ethnic minorities help explaining the moderation of ethnic conflict or perceptions like satisfaction with democracy. His work on this area has been published in journals like European Journal of Political Research. All his work is conducted using a comparative and a quantitative approach. He is currently engaged in understanding electoral systems changes and the survival of ethnic minority parties under a joint research project sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation of which Rubén is the Principal Investigator.