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SPS on the Job Market

Current Job Market Candidates of the Department of Political and Social Sciences

Please find more below about our job market researchers and their research

All our PhDs are reachable through email.

Tarek Jaziri-Arjona is a political scientist and sociologist trained at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where he earned his degree in Sociology and Political Science, followed by a Master’s in Social Sciences at the Juan March Institute. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the European University Institute, focusing on the dynamics of political behaviour and electoral processes. His dissertation explores how daily interactions with friends and family shape political norms and behaviours. During his doctoral studies, he has presented his work at international conferences and conducted research stays at the London School of Economics and New York University.

Email:  [email protected]

Research Interest/s: Political behaviour, elections, social networks, parties, social norms, causal inference

For more information and links to published and ongoing work, please visit:  Personal website

 

I am a PhD Researcher in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). My research sits at the intersection of political economy and political behaviour. In my doctoral work, I study the politics of the green transition, focusing on how different actors respond to and are shaped by decarbonization policies. I emphasize the role of economic geography, human capital, and education in shaping these dynamics. More broadly, my work connects the literatures on distributive conflict, climate politics, and comparative political economy. Methodologically, I employ causal inference techniques with observational data, field and survey experiments, and qualitative interviews. During my doctoral studies, I have been a Junior Visiting Scholar at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and served as a co-organizer of the Political Behavior Colloquium (PBC) at the EUI (2023–24). I hold an MSc in Political Science from Leiden University and a BA in Economics from Trinity College Dublin.

Job Market Paper: Adapt or Perish: How the Spatial Distribution of Human Capital Shapes the Economic and Political Effects of the Green Transition

Email: [email protected]

Research Interest/s: Political Economy, Political Behaviour, Climate Politics, Distributional Politics

For more information and links to published and ongoing work, please visit:  Personal website

 

Magalí Serra Duran is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute, specializing in comparative politics and historical political economy. Her work explores the evolution of gender norms and how they shape women's collective consciousness and agency over time. She aims to uncover the historical and political processes that influence gender dynamics, offering insights into societal change and equality. She holds a master’s in research in political science and a master’s in political analysis.

Job Market Paper:  "Normative Breaches and Women's Mobilization: The Enduring Legacy of Executions in Catalonia"

Email:  [email protected]

Research Interest/s: Research Interest/s: Gender norms; political violence; political behaviour; women’s suffrage; democratisation

 

Martin Fischer is a PhD researcher in political economy at the European University Institute. His dissertation analyses how speculative dynamics shaped European monetary integration in the 1980s and 1990s. Having a background in Economics, he holds a Dual Master’s degree in European Affairs and Political Economy from Sciences Po and LSE and previously worked in banking supervision at the European Central Bank. During his PhD, he has been a visiting scholar at Sciences Po and Hertie School.

Job Market Paper: From Market Discipline to Monetary Integration: Germany’s Response to Financial Threats in the EMS

Email: [email protected]

Research Interests: Political economy; Banking and finance; European integration; European Monetary Union; Financial markets.

 

Pau Grau-Vilalta studies coercion and political mobilization with a focus on 19th and 20th century Europe. In his research, he has studied how bureaucrats’ career incentives shape surveillance under authoritarianism, and how xenophobic riots affect elections. His current work focuses on school provision and nation-building in the Habsburg Empire. He was a visiting scholar at Yale University. Before EUI, he worked as a predoctoral researcher at IPERG in the University of Barcelona.

Job Market Paper: Feather-Handed Fascists: Surveillance as a Signal of Bureaucratic Loyalty

Email: [email protected]

Research Interests: Political mobilization; historical political economy; bureaucracy; repression; authoritarian politics; state–society relations; elections; collective action.

For more information and links to published and ongoing work, please visit:  Personal website

 

Nahla Mansour is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute. She currently specializes in the electoral costs of parties’ political moderation, within the context of both political and ethnic competition. During her PhD, she also spent a visiting period at Central European University. She holds an International Master's in South European Studies EUROSUD. She also holds an MRes in Political Research from the EUI and a BA in Political Science from Cairo University.

Job Market Paper: Where Does Moderation Pay: District Magnitude, Ethnic Composition, and the Vote Shares of Moderate Parties

Email: [email protected]

Research Interest/s: Political behaviour, political parties, electoral systems, Ethnic politics, MENA politics.

For more information and links to published and ongoing work, please visit:  Personal website

Shape

Karmen Misiou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her research lies at the intersection of Historical Political Economy and identity formation, with a particular focus on how experiences of discrimination influence assimilation decisions among minority communities in early 20th-century Europe and the United States. She holds an MSc in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam and an MRes from the European University Institute. Her academic work has been recognized with multiple awards, reflecting both its scholarly contribution and broader relevance. Karmen’s job market paper investigates the effects of the 1924 Sunday closing law in Salonica, Greece—a policy that established Sunday as the official day of rest—on Jewish identity. By analyzing this case of state-imposed religious conformity, she offers novel insights into how legal and institutional discrimination can shape minority identity responses.

Job Market Paper: When Does Discrimination Trigger Identity Backlash?

Email:  [email protected]

Research Interest/s: Historical Political Economy, Identity Politics, Comparative Politics, Migration and Integration, Causal Inference

 

Pablo Cañete Pérez holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the Universitat de Barcelona and a master’s degree in Social Sciences Research from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He is currently completing his PhD in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. His research explores the cultural foundations of democratic life, with a particular focus on how political institutions, economic transformations, and symbolic narratives interact to shape public legitimacy and policy outcomes. His work lies at the intersection of political sociology, historical institutionalism, and the study of democratic cultures in Southern Europe.

Job Market Paper: Whispers aloud: How democratic values shape narrative during austerity

Email: [email protected]

Research Interest/s: Political culture, comparative politics, mixed methods, media analysis, elite studies

 

Nini Petriashvili comes from Tbilisi, Georgia. She holds two master's degrees in political science, one from the University of Mannheim and another from Central European University (CEU). Previously, she worked as a Junior Researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), where she conducted research on Voting Advice Applications (VAA). In her free time, she enjoys hiking and traveling. She is passionate about movies and wine (not necessarily together or in that order).

Job Market Paper: When Search Engines Are Harmful: The Interplay Of Reflective Thinking And Motivated Reasoning In Susceptibility To Misinformation

Email: [email protected] 

Research Interest/s: Political Communication, Search Engines, Social Media, Misinformation, Political Psychology, Political Economy

 

Eréndira León-Salvador is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science at the European University Institute. Her research examines how political actors and bureaucrats shape migration and asylum policy and how these choices structure the lives and political agency of immigrants and refugees, combining qualitative fieldwork and causal inference.

Job Market Paper: The Politics of Bureaucratic Discretion under Populist Rule: Evidence from Italy’s Asylum System

Email: [email protected]

Research Interest/s: political economy of migration, asylum and citizenship; street-level bureaucracy; radical right parties and anti-immigration politics; immigrant and refugee political participation; public opinion and political behaviour; causal inference and mixed methods.

For more information and links to published and ongoing work, please visit:
Personal website

 

 Ludwig Schulze is a political scientist studying why citizens support authoritarian actors. His dissertation focuses on authoritarian regime support in former communist countries, but his broader research compares how political preferences form in both autocracies and democracies. During his PhD, Ludwig was a visiting researcher at the Government Department of the London School of Economics and the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. Before beginning his doctoral studies at the EUI, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Freie Universität Berlin and Sciences Po, respectively.

Job Market Paper: Political Economy of Military Presence in Autocracies: Evidence from the German Democratic Republic

Email: [email protected]

Research Interest/s: “Historical Political Economy, Authoritarianism, Democratic Backsliding”

For more information and links to published and ongoing work, please visit:
Personal website

 

My research centers on digital spaces. I examine the political consequences of public debate increasingly taking place online, including how it shapes political preferences and behavior. I approach this agenda from two angles. First, I examine how this shift affects citizens’ access to political information. Second, I analyze how in-group dynamics in interactive spaces shape political preferences and behavior at both the individual and aggregate levels.

Job Market Paper: Online Political Influence: The Role of Groups (co-author: Henri Pozsar, EUI)

Research Interest/s: Social media, political behavior, public opinion, platform governance, algorithmic curation; content moderation, online communities; in-group dynamics.

Email: [email protected]

 

Ingvild Zinober is a political scientist whose research lies at the intersection of gender studies and political behaviour. Her work examines how gender role identity influences political attitudes and voting behaviour. Ingvild is particularly interested in how masculinity norms and masculinising gender performance influence men’s political behaviour. In her dissertation, Ingvild draws on insights from gender research to formulate a new theoretical framework for studying the gender gap in views on climate and environmental politics.

Job Market Paper: Understanding the Green Gender Gap: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Role Identity

Email: [email protected] 

Research Interest/s: Political behaviour, gender, climate and environmental politics.

Page last updated on 12/11/2025