Biography

Ari Ray is a political scientist whose research centers on comparative political behavior and political economy. She defended her PhD thesis at the University of Zurich in February 2020. During her studies, Ari was an SNSF pre-doctoral Fellow at the Political Science Department of Stanford University, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics and a BSc from Copenhagen Business School.

In her dissertation, Ari studied distributional conflict and the behavioral foundations of economic policymaking in the Eurozone periphery. Among other questions, this work evaluated factors shaping the fiscal attitudes of political actors during the crisis, as well as how these preferences translated into political coalitions between societal interests. This work is being published by Oxford University Press in Fall 2020.

In addition to her work on fiscal policy, Ari also researches questions pertaining to socio-political inequality. During her time as a Max Weber Fellow, she will evaluate the extent to which informal network ties affect the political career trajectories of American citizens. Her project, jointly undertaken together with William Marble at Stanford University, has been awarded the Russell Sage Foundation’s Small Grant in Computational Social Science.

Ari has taught topics in comparative and international political economy to undergraduates at the University of Zurich. Starting Fall 2020, she will be based at the Political Science Department of the University of Geneva.