Explaining the dynamics of contemporary authoritarian regimes requires understanding how ordinary citizens in such regimes form political attitudes and act on them. What makes people support authoritarian leaders? How do people living under autocratic rule react to signals of its declining publi...
Does exposure to climate-related natural disasters increase awareness about climate change and support for Green political parties? Can educational interventions play a role in harnessing support for costly climate policies? To answer these questions, this dissertation uses observational and exp...
This dissertation examines the political attitudes and voting behaviour of rural populations in Spain, focusing on the growing support for far-right and mainstream right-wing parties. While challenging conventional views on the rural-urban divide, it introduces a more refined typology that disti...
Clientelism — generally contrasted with programmatic politics — is a pervasive challenge to democratic development. The demise of clientelism substantively necessitates citizens to conceive of their interest as involving public goods, and to set aside client-patron norms and loyalties in favour ...
The conventional American adage that ‘politics ends at the water’s edge’ is no longer taken for granted across the democratic world. Political parties and domestic actors actively contest foreign and security policy, undermining pre-existing academic expectations about cross-party consensus as a...
This dissertation investigates parties’ signalling strategies from various angles. It analyses how language and positioning of political actors affect electoral dynamics and voter decisions. By looking at how different language and positioning patterns interact, it aims to show how populist and ...
This thesis is born out of a question was raised by the 2011 revolution in Egypt: ‘why are Egyptian intellectuals silent?’ However, there was a manifest proliferation of cultural and artistic production carried out by a younger generation of artists, journalists, novelists, musicians and others....
This document summarises the highlights of the Seminar Series of the Social Classes in the Digital Age (DIGCLASS) Project held between October 2022 and June 2023. The DIGCLASS seminar series is expected to facilitate the exchange of cutting-edge ideas and debates between social science academics...
In the past 20 years, extreme parties have emerged and strengthened across European party systems, such as Podemos in Spain, the AFD in Germany, or Fratelli d’Italia in Italy. Could the polarization of parties be the cure to growing abstention in European systems by offering true political alter...
TikTok has stormed into the social media realm with unique dexterity in engineering virality, to which users contribute both passively and actively through sophisticated yet accessible built-in editing tools. The research corroborates recent media uproar around the platform’s tendency to bring p...
