Congratulations to Ivetta Sergeeva, Dylan Potts, Julian Vierlinger, Steven Ballantyne, Ariane Aumaitre, Nils Oellerich, and Jona de Jong for receiving their doctorates in October 2024 after unanimous decisions from the jury.
Ivetta Sergeeva successfully defended her dissertation, Three essays on Russian political migration following the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on 1 October 2024. Working together with another EUI PhD researcher (Emil Kamalov), Sergeeva collected a multi-wave panel dataset involving more than 10,000 individuals in 100 countries. The three chapters of the dissertation report some results of the analyses of the data collected.
Read Sergeeva's thesis in Cadmus.
Dylan Potts successfully defended his dissertation, Three Essays on Behavior in Organized Political Violence, on 2 October 2024. Comprising three separate chapters, the dissertation uses modern methods of causal inference to investigate conditions under which individuals choose to participate in collective violence. The case materials are all taken from US history, and range from desertion by Irish recruits in the Civil War to volunteering for military service in World War II.
Read Potts' thesis in Cadmus.
Julian Vierlinger successfully defended his dissertation, Recentering the Public: Three Studies on Programmatic Development in Lebanon, on 3 October 2024. Julian's is a paper-based dissertation that studies contemporary politics in Lebanon.
Read Vierlinger's thesis in Cadmus.
Steven Ballantyne's dissertation, Social Investment Reform in Europe: From Policy Adoption to Design and Implementation, defended on 4 October 2024, carefully traces processes of social investment reform across Europe in countries and subnational territories that are not – according to the comparative welfare politics literature – ideal for social investment policy adoption, including Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Scotland. In conclusion, Steven attributes social investment success reform to structures of public administration in terms of design, implementation, managing policy complementarities, and performance monitoring feedback, and less to important differences in partisan political preferences and producer groups' interest collective action.
Read Ballantyne's thesis in Cadmus.
Ariane Aumaitre's dissertation, Reconfiguring the Social Contract: Individual Outcomes and Welfare State Evolution in Post-Industrial Societies, defended on 4 October 2024, features high-quality innovative research on the interesting link between macro-level welfare state change and micro-level outcomes in material wellbeing, sophistically teasing out the micro-correlates of macro-level welfare reform in post-industrial societies. The core argument is that post-industrial welfare state change can be associated with elements of improvement in terms of gender equality, inter-generational equity, and intra-generational justice. However, specific risk groups, in particular non-traditional families, such as lone parents, mostly women, low-educated individuals, and their children, are falling behind. In conclusion, Ariane advocates ‘targeted universalism’, based on the Danish model, as an effective policy response going forward.
Read Aumaitre's thesis in Cadmus.
Nils Oellerich defended his thesis, Financial Activism against the Neoliberal Backdrop: Tracing Institutional Variation in Development Finance, in East-Central Europe, on 7 October 2024. This is a book-length manuscript that leverages the variation of financial activism since the Great Financial Crisis in a region that has traditionally been characterised by a highly transnationalised financial sector and inactive governments. The thesis explores the variation, and, honing on in two cases – Poland and Romania, explains success and failure in creating and using development finance institutions. Its major contribution is the development of a novel and fine-grained conceptualisation of state capacity. The committee members agreed that the thesis offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative analysis of financial activism whose insights have the potential to travel beyond the region of East-Central Europe.
Read Oellerich's thesis in Cadmus.
Jona de Jong defended his thesis, Enduring Divides? Social Networks and the Entrenchment of Political Polarization, on 31 October 2024. It is an excellent thesis composed of four papers that studies the role of homogenous and heterogeneous social networks in the formation of the educational cleavage, above all in the Netherlands, and of partisan polarisation in the US. The central question it tries to answer is to what extent the embedding of individuals in social networks contributes to the establishment of durable political conflicts in a given national polity. The key idea is that the corresponding effect of the networks depends on the extent to which they are homogenous or heterogeneous in some relevant respect.
Read de Jong's thesis in Cadmus.