In a world marked by vast inequalities in income and wealth, citizen demand for redistribution plays a decisive role, especially in democracies. My research investigates how individuals perceive inequality, assess its fairness, and form preferences over taxation and redistribution. Using a variety of survey experiments, conjoint analyses, and cross-national data, I explore how objective measures of inequality, subjective perceptions, and policy beliefs relate and shape preferences. My research attests to the importance of horizontal inequality, i.e. income gaps between social groups, the historical origins of wealth, and diverging elite-citizens beliefs about the economic impact of progressive taxation. It highlights temporal dynamics of perception-preference linkages, and explores them in the context of international inequality and redistribution. I also study how policy design alters and polarizes attitudes towards novel redistributive policies, such as UBI. In sum, my research advances our understanding of when and why citizens demand that governments enact redistributive policies.
Understanding how historical institutions shape long-term social, political, and economic outcomes is critical for explaining persistent development disparities. My work sheds light on the colonial legacies of social policy and education in Africa by unpacking interactions between different colonizing actors and local communities. I combine archival research with geospatial techniques to tap new data sources and study legacies at a highly granular level. My research demonstrates how non-governmental actors, in particular Christian missions, continue to shape contemporary educational outcomes, showing that their impact is moderated by relations to colonial governments and local communities, and has downstream consequences for gender equality and support for democracy. Further work highlights the early impact and persistence of colonial expenditure priorities, including continuities in international aid transfers. My work contributes to our understanding of deeply rooted policy and governance challenges, and might inform ways of overcoming them.
Politics in Western democracies has become increasingly populist and polarized. My research investigates the causes of these developments and seeks to understand how some of its undesired consequences might be addressed. Using survey experiments, natural experiments, and fine-grained electoral data, I explore how political behavior is shaped by emotions, identity, and strategic motives. For example, I study how memory policies shape public opinion and voting, and how citizens respond to cooperation between mainstream parties and the far-right. I am also involved in a large-scale panel study that explores dynamics of issue-based and partisan affective polarization and their relationship in the context of multi-party systems.