Congratulations to Jørgen Eikvar Axelsen, Mirko Wegemann, Anna Clemente, and Rens Chazottes from the Department of Political and Social Sciences, for receiving their doctorates in September 2024, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
Jorgen Axelsen defended his thesis, Challengers in Check. Local Government Participation of Challenger Parties in Norway and Sweden, on 10 September 2024. This is a book-length thesis that studies the impact of local government participation on radical challenger parties (defined as parties using challenger tactics to establish and maintain themselves electorally). The thesis addresses three types of questions: how do the challengers get into local government, what is their impact on local policy output, and how are they affected by government participation locally and nationally? The thesis makes an important contribution to the literature, among other things, by marshalling an impressive wealth of evidence on local government participation in Norway and Sweden to show that the inclusion of challenger parties, indeed, leads to their moderation.
Read Axelsen’s thesis in Cadmus.
Mirko Wegemann defended his dissertation, Roads to the Establishment. How Challengers Become Mainstream, on 12 September 2024. The thesis argues that challenger parties may reach out to broader groups of voters either by enlarging their issue focus beyond their original niche issue (issue yield) or directly appealing to specific social groups (social group yield), for example by relying on group ‘spokespersons’ to relay their policy proposals. The committee members agreed that Mirko’s use of cutting-edge data collection and methods provides a convincing empirical basis for his arguments and that he makes an original contribution to our understanding of party politics.
Read Wegemann’s thesis in Cadmus.
Anna Clemente defended her thesis, Unequal but Fair? Investigating the Persistence of Meritocratic Beliefs, on 19 September 2024. In the thesis, Anna studies the conditions under which meritocracy, as an inequality-justifying belief, breaks down. Her empirical chapters identify three such conditions: (a) The sobering experience of a sudden drop in income, (b) rapid increases in highly visible forms of inequality, such as diverging housing prices within neighbourhoods, and (c) the availability of an alternative narrative, specifically one of inequity aversion. The jury was unanimous in finding the thesis both empirically rigorous and theoretically innovative.
Read Clemente’s thesis in Cadmus.
Rens Chazottes defended his dissertation on 25 September 2024. Entitled Political Participation and Accountability Mechanisms in Tropical Forest Governance, the dissertation consists of three separate studies of issues related to forest governance in sub-Saharan African countries. The research draws on extensive original fieldwork and uses modern statistical and experimental methods. The main argument is that there is no single recipe for successful conservation and forest governance, which instead depends on local political economy arrangements.
Read Chazottes’ thesis in Cadmus.