Congratulations to Rebeca González Antuña, Susanna Garside, Balthazar de Robiano, Manuel Alvariño Vázquez, Ivan Fomichev, Sven Schreurs, Tiago Vieira, Nora Wukovits-Votzi, Ivo Iliev, Luis Russo, Marco Santacroce and Tae Kyeong Meixner-Yun from the Department of Political and Social Sciences, for receiving their doctorates in June 2025, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
On 6 June 2025, Rebeca González Antuña successfully defended her thesis, Towards a New Definition of Rurality. Rural Agrarianism, Attitudes, and Voting Behaviour in Spain. The dissertation addresses the rural-urban cleavage in Spain. Rebeca adopts a historical, electoral, and interpretative approach to this subject, allowing her to develop a deep and nuanced analysis of the causes and nature of this cleavage. Furthermore, she collects novel data and deploys a wide arsenal of analytic methods to make an innovative and original argument about the characteristics of this rural cleavage and its attitudinal, electoral, and partisan consequences. The thesis makes a broad theoretical contribution on the nature of rurality while displaying a rich contextual knowledge. The diversity and range of different methods and data—including interviews, archival research, experiments, and regression analyses—was impressive and attests to the versatility of the candidate. The thesis was supervised by EUI Professor Ellen Immergut, and the jury included Ruth Dassonneville (KU Leuven), Professor Pedro Riera Sagrera (University Carlos III of Madrid), and Elias Dinas (EUI).
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On 9 June 2025, Susanna Garside defended her thesis, Causes of Changes in Climate Change Public Opinion and Political Behaviour. Her dissertation on how public opinion responds to climate change in Europe, comprising three papers, presents original, rigorous, and policy-relevant results that overall emphasise the importance of experiences and of education in how voters evaluate climate change.
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On 9 June 2025, Balthazar de Robiano defended his thesis, Tenure Inequalities. The ubiquitous crisis of housing financialization. His highly ambitious thesis makes the bold claim that the promotion of homeownership through mortgage credit has led to rising house prices and greater tenure inequalities. As a result, lower- and middle-income groups are increasingly excluded from homeownership and face higher prices in the rental market. While homeowners benefit from capital gains, renters face higher costs and precarity. This has created a stratification between creditworthy households and others, even in the most equal countries. In addition, declining political support for affordable rental supply and rising price-to-rent ratios have worsened conditions for renters. Drawing on data from many sources across a wide set of countries, complemented with more in-depth assessments of housing policies in several countries, strengthens the credibility of the findings and relevant policy implications. A grand thesis!
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On 10 June 2025, Manuel Alvariño Vázquez defended his thesis, Conservative Parties, Progressive Policies. The Politics of the Ongoing Gender Revolution. Manuel Alvariño’s original thesis explains why and how centre-right parties in conservative welfare states have shifted from supporting male-breadwinner family models to endorsing dual-earner family policies. Based on a novel theory on the role of partisan feedback effects in sequential welfare state transformation, the argument is that observed programmatic changes are not purely responses to socio-economic pressures or shifts in political demand but are driven by policy feedback sequence effects from left-wing governments that introduced the new policies in the first place. As these innovations generate positive feedback effects, this inspires centre-right parties to also adopt and expand work-life balance policies for dual earners. A highly important corrective on extant theories of the politics of welfare reform!
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On 10 June 2025, Ivan Fomichev defended his thesis, Three Essays on Political Behavior and Attitudes in Authoritarian Regimes. The dissertation consists of three papers that interrogate the Russian public’s views of the regime and support for President Putin. The data underlying the research is original, and the methods used are methodologically rigorous.
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On 10 June 2025, Sven Schreurs defended his thesis, The Quiet Emancipation of Social Europe. EU Social and Labour Market Policy from the 1990s to the 2020s. Sven’s groundbreaking thesis in depth and breadth covers no less than three decades of social and labour policy development since the late 1980s, based on many data sources, including primary resources and an impressive number of 130 interviews. By theoretically bringing back ideas and learning to the analysis of the quiet emancipation of Social Europe, the dissertation effectively corrects dominant structuralist and at times overly deterministic accounts in the literature. By giving a constructivist twist to actor-centered institutionalism (Fritz Scharpf), the research highlights the role of agency in a very nuanced way, showing how policy communities matter by differentiating their (multi-) actor constellations (politics, bureaucracy, and expertise), their orientations (preferences and ideas) and modes of interaction, in a truly innovative manner. This is as close as a dissertation can get to a university press book manuscript.
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On 11 June 2025, Tiago Vieira defended his thesis, Quo vadis employment relationship? Insights from the deployment of algorithmic management in conventional employment settings. Tiago’s very timely thesis examines how algorithmic management is deployed in organisations with conventional employment relations, covered by collective bargaining. The thesis does confirm opaque decision-making and greater power asymmetries between management and employees, which can lead to increasing work intensification and decreasing managerial accountability. At the same time, the thesis cautions against dystopian outlooks on the impact of technology on employment relations, reaffirming the central role of managerial practices and human-machine complementarities. Through the focus on “conventional employment settings”, combining quantitative analyses with in-depth case studies, the thesis conjures up a highly original contribution to the sociology of work and industrial relations, adding rich empirics to existing work on algorithmic management that has so far predominantly focused on digital platforms. An extremely rich thesis in theory, scope, and methods!
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On 17 June 2025, Nora Wukovits-Votzi defended her thesis, How policies shape 'fissured' workplaces. Varieties of solo self-employment in the Netherlands, France, and Austria. Nora Wukovits-Votzi’s dissertation represents a timely and methodologically well-executed research on the growth of solo self-employment in the Netherlands, France, and Austria - three ‘Continental/Bismarckian’ welfare states. Each of these countries has followed varied trajectories of solo self-employment growth. Methodologically clarifying how macro-level structures shape micro-level mechanisms and outcomes is the key strength of the research. The question that is consequently pursued is how labour market and welfare state policies and institutions shape the development of solo self-employment and its characteristics across these three similar welfare regimes. By doing so, the dissertation adds novel insights to both comparative welfare state research (e.g. Esping-Andersen’s three worlds of welfare capitalism) and comparative political economy research (e.g. Thelen’s varieties of liberalisation), effectively bringing these two literatures together. A thesis worthy of book publication.
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On 18 June 2025, Ivo Illiev defended his thesis, Governing the Economy in the Digital Age: Globalisation, the State, and Eastern Europe's Comparative Advantage in Information Technology. Ivo’s dissertation offers a nuanced and theoretically rich exploration of the role of the state in forging ICT capabilities within the European periphery. Tracing the emergence and transformation of Bulgaria’s ICT sector from the 1960s until today and comparing it to Serbia's, Romania's, and Albania's attempts at nurturing an ICT industry, the thesis identifies industrial policies under socialism, the structural characters of the software industry itself, and the EU's industrial policies as explanatory factors. The thesis jury – Professor Cornel Ban (Copenhagen Business School), Professor Dorothee Bohle, (University of Vienna, former EUI), Professor Anton Hemerijck (EUI); Professor Herman Mark Schwartz (University of Virginia) – congratulate Dr. Iliev on an impressive achievement.
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On 25 June 2025, Luis Russo defended his thesis, Through Hardship, to the Stars? Economic Expectations and Support for the European Union During the COVID-19 and Ukraine Crises. Luis' masterful and original dissertation, examining public opinion during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, infers that economic motivations are the most important drivers of contemporary attitudes on European integration. By thus taking issue with influential post-functionalist theories of EU politics that emphasise how culture or identity has shaped attitudes, is bold. Yet, a strong forte of the thesis is the careful concerns and measured and precise identification of the scope conditions, e.g. external validity, of the overall argument. Moreover, the dissertation assesses economic and cultural arguments in the unusual context of two major crises – the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine, creating special circumstances in which economics trumps identity. The empirics are sequentially tested across four papers, drawn from the 2018-2023 'EUI-YouGov Solidarity in Europe' time-series. All this allows for a rich empirical foundation for the research, in terms of time-series, EU country overage, for both dependent and key independent variables pre- and post-crisis, using observational as well as experimental analysis. An original and timely thesis based on solid empirical foundations.
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On 27 June 2025, Marco Santacroce defended his thesis, I Was The Third Brother of Five, Doing Whatever I Had To Do To Survive: Siblings, Families, and Life Course. The starting point of the thesis is the observation that most of the variation in the socioeconomic outcomes that social scientists are interested in is between children who grew up in the same family rather than between children from different families, yet most research has focused on the latter. In four papers, the thesis unpacks patterns of social differentiation and inequality between siblings, focusing on birth order, the influences that siblings have on each other, and their consequences for inequality.
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On 30 June 2025, Tae Kyeong Meixner-Yun defended his thesis, Making Sense of Techno-Society. Essays on digitalised social relations and their impact on social cohesion. The thesis jury, comprised of EUI Professor Arnout van de Rijt, former EUI Professor Klarita Gërxhani (Free University Amsterdam), Beate Völker (Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement) and Stephen Benard (Indiana University Bloomington, USA), unanimously agreed that the thesis significantly advances sociological understanding of the effects of the transition from offline to online interactions on social relationships.
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