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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.

Aziz Bagadirov is a Hannah Arendt Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). Previously, he has been a Chevening Scholar at the University of Southampton (UK) and has worked in the UN Refugee Agency. His research focuses on the connection between the structures of oppression and human flourishing, in particular a proper theory of well-being for relational egalitarianism. You can find his most recent co-authored work here.

Job market paper: "Structural injustice and human flourishing" (Abstract)

Research Interests: Political and Social Theory; Theories of Justice; Well-being; Class and Domination; Critical theory.

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

 

Ines Bolaños Somoano is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Political Sciences at the European University Institute, and a visting researcher at ISGA, The Hague. Her research looks at EU counter terrorism policy, concretely Prevention of Radicalization; online dissemination of propaganda; securitisation of Islam; and the growth of right wing extremist violence in Europe. Ines favors the use of qualitative methods: interviews and (digital) archival work.

Job market paper: "The right-leaning be memeing: Extremist uses of Internet memes and insights for CVE design"

Research Interests: EU Internal Security; Prevention of Radicalization and Countering Violent Extremism; Institutional Fieldwork.

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

 

Francesca Bramucci  is currently pursuing a PhD at the department of Political and Social Sciences with a focus on prejudice and discrimination reduction, gender equality and social norms. She was also vising PhD student at New York University (New York). She previously completed an MSc and a BA in Economics and Social Sciences at Bocconi University (Milan). Her methodological interests are experimental and quantitative methods.

Job Market Paper: Working Papers abstracts

Research Interest/s: discrimination, prejudice, inter-group contact, gender equality, social norms, quantitative methods

 

Pedro Martín-Cadenas is a PhD researcher in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute and a visiting researcher at the IPZ, University of Zurich. His research focuses on the relationship between inequality and mobilization and their effects on political attitudes and behavior. Using quantitative methodologies, his research looks at patterns of political contestation, taking a local and a country-level perspective. 

Job market paper (available upon request): "Banking Alone: The Political Implications of Deprivation in Access to Banking Services"

Research interests: Political Sociology, protests, inequality, quantitative methodology

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

 

Anna Clemente is a PhD researcher in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her research looks at the origins of meritocratic beliefs and their persistence over time, through experimental methods and causal inference techniques using survey and Twitter data. She holds an MPhil from the University of Oxford and has been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford under the Schuman Fulbright program and at the Connected_Politics Lab (University College Dublin).

Job Market Paper: "Mind the Bricks: Fairness Beliefs and Local Housing Inequality in the UK"

Research Interest/s: Socio-economic Inequalities and preferences fore redistribution; Elite discourse;  Public Opinion; Experimental methods.

 

Gaia Ghirardi is a PhD researcher at the Department of Political and Social Science at the European University Institute. She is a sociologist interested in understanding the reproduction of social inequality on various socio-demographic and health outcomes. In particular, in her PhD dissertation, she studies how genes and environment interact in shaping social inequality in educational attainment. In her thesis, she uses decades of sociological theories and knowledge to further investigate educational inequalities including genetics data. During her PhD, she was also a visiting researcher at INED and CREST (Paris), University of Bologna, and UNED (Madrid).

Job Market Paper: "Re-theorizing sociogenomics research on the gene-by-family socioeconomic status (GxSES) interaction for educational attainment" (under review)

Research Interest/s: Social stratification, Educational inequalities, Sociogenomics, Early childhood

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

 

Nerea Gándara Guerra is a PhD researcher at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the European University Institute and research affiliate at the NYU Wilf Family Department of Politics. She was a visiting researcher at the LSE Department of Government during the Fall of 2021. Her research interests lie in the fields of social movements, public opinion and political behaviour, with a particular emphasis on gender norms and attitudes towards feminism and women's movements.

Job market paper: " 'We are your pack’: Feminist Social Movements on Countering Violence Against Women" (Abstract)

Research Interest: Public Opinion, Political Behaviour, Social Movements, Gender & Politics Personal Website

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

 

Marius Ghincea is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). Concurrently, he is a Research Fellow at the Hertie School of Government, Centre for International Security, and teaches Transnational Governance at the School of Transnational Studies as well as IR theory at the John's Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Through policy papers and op-eds in major newspapers, he contributes regularly in Romanian and transatlantic policy debates on issues related to foreign policy and security. 

Job market paper: "Manufacturing Consensus: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy" (Abstract)

Research Interests: Determinants of Foreign Policy; Global Ordering Projects; National Identity Contestation.

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

 

Jona de Jong is a PhD candidate in sociology and political science. He was a Fulbright Scholar at NYU’s Department of Sociology, and a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Department of Government. In his dissertation project, he studies the relation between increased socioeconomic segregation and political polarization, using causal inference methods, experiments and panel data. One of his papers is forthcoming in Nature Communications Psychology; another has an R&R at Comparative Political Studies.   

Research Interest/s: Political polarization, cleavages, social networks, experiments, causal inference

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

 

Short Biography: Selma Kropp is a PhD Researcher at the Department for Political and Social Sciences at the EUI. In her thesis, she traces the development of regional children’s rights regimes in the African Union and the European Union after the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989. In particular, she investigates how a lack of voice of member states during UN negotiations impacts the sequencing of regional institutionalization as well as global feedback effects.

Job Market Paper: "The African Union's Children's Rights Regime: Norm Subsidiarity and De-Linking od Norm Clusters"

Research Interest/s: International Organizations, Norm Complexity, Historical Institutionalism, Children’s Rights, African Union, European Union

 

Wolfgang Minatti is a PhD Researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI), and a Visiting Scholar at the Cluster of Excellence SCRIPTS at the Freie Universität Berlin. His PhD project investigates the legitimation of armed actors during civil war, focusing on the Colombian conflict. He develops a relational theory of legitimation that allows to map the micro-dynamics of legitimacy and empirically illustrate this theory by investigating the legitimation of the FARC rebel group within the Colombian conflict, using a qualitative methodology.

Writing sample: "Legitimate Governance in International Politics: Towards a Relational Theory of Legitimation" 

Research Interests: International Relations Theory; (Global) Governance; Legitimation; Civil War.

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

 

Diana Rafailova is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. She received degrees from King’s College London and Bard College, NY. Her research focuses on authoritarian regimes, public goods provision, and education. In her dissertation, she explores the relationship between political regimes and the quality of schooling at the cross-national level.

Job market paper: "School Quality under Distinct Political Regimes: Do Autocracies Restrict Critical Thinking?" (Abstract)

Research Interest: Political Regimes, Russian Politics, Public Goods Provision, Education Personal Website

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

 

Julian studied holds degrees from SciencesPo Paris, and studied at the American University of Beirut. His thesis on clientelism, political mobilization, and democratic innovation in Lebanon employs surveys, interviews, and causal inference designs, and includes joint work with researchers at Harvard and IHEID. He has presented in conferences such as APSA and EPSA, but also to Lebanese policy makers. He has taught at SciencesPo and CEU. He volunteers as a paramedic with the Italian Red Cross.

Job Market Paper: "And when it all blows up? Corruption Victimization, Blast Physics, and the Electoral Effects of the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion"

Research Interest/s Corruption, clientelism, democratic development, experiments, humanitarian affairs, Middle Eastern Studies

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

 

My research explores changing patterns of party competition in Western Europe, with a focus on challenger parties’ programmatic evolution. I also delve into other aspects related to political behaviour, examining gender in politics and citizens' perceptions of policy justifications. Methodologically, I employ quantitative methods, computational text analysis, and experimental research."

Job Market Paper: "Going Local? How Mainstream Parties React to the Local Framing of Migration by the Radical Right."

Research interests: Representation; gender and politics; party competition; computational text analysis

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

 

Page last updated on 12/01/2024