Biography
Francesco Mattioli is a political economist who joined the EUI after receiving his PhD in Social and Political Science from Bocconi University in summer 2026.
His research seeks to understand how political institutions operate in democratic systems, and why they succeed or fail at achieving effective policy outcomes under strain. In his PhD thesis, he studied political selection, voter participation and electoral accountability. More broadly, he works at the intersection of political economy, the economics of institutions and culture, public economics, demography and health. Methodologically, he combines causal inference and computational methods to analyse large-scale administrative data, social media and legislative text corpora, and survey and experimental data. His research has been featured in outlets including The Economist and The Washington Post.
Prior to starting his PhD, Francesco received an MSc in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University and worked at the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. He has lectured in political science, econometrics, research methods and data analysis.
During his Max Weber Fellowship, Francesco will continue working on democratic resilience. He plans to examine how turnout decline, locally and comparatively, affects downstream policy outcomes such as public finance, welfare and social assistance, and employment, and whether these effects are driven by accountability or representation dynamics. He also plans to advance methodological and data-driven approaches to studying political selection, institutions and policy responsiveness.