Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.

My research focuses on comparative politics and historical political economy. I study how political order is built and contested: how social divisions become politically mobilized, and how states respond through bureaucratic agents, coercion, and mass institutions. I digitize historical micro-data and combine it with quasi-experimental designs and geospatial analysis, with a focus on 19th- and 20th-century Europe.

In Fall 2024, I was a visiting scholar at Yale University. At the EUI, I led the Research Analytics Unit and co-organized the Comparative Politics Seminar Series. Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked as a Research Assistant at the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group (IPERG) at the University of Barcelona.

I am on the 2025–2026 academic job market. I’d be happy to connect, feel free to reach out!

Working papers

• [Job Market Paper]: Feather-Handed Fascists? Surveillance as a Signal of Bureaucratic Alignment (with Lorenzo Vicari and Andrea Xamo) [PDF] [Abstract]

  What shapes surveillance in autocratic regimes? Existing theories offer competing expectations: some predict that ideological loyalists engage in more repression, while others emphasize career incentives and strategic signaling by bureaucrats whose loyalty is uncertain. We assemble a novel dataset on provincial prefects in Fascist Italy (1922–45), linking biographies of all 415 prefects to over 28,000 monthly province-level surveillance records. Exploiting variation in prefects’ appointments across provinces, we compare how the same province was monitored by prefects of different partisan types at different times. We find that prefects without credible ideological credentials conducted about 25 per cent more surveillance and that surveillance reduced dismissal risk only for these uncertified bureaucrats. These findings provide rare systematic evidence on authoritarian surveillance and show how career incentives, rather than ideology, can drive coercive behavior.

• Ne parlons pas de l’Affair Dreyfus: The electoral impact of the 1898 antisemitic riots in France (with Simon Hix, Under Review) [Abstract]

  Research on contemporary cases of political violence finds either a backlash against the forces responsible for the violence or an increase in the support for the issues raised by the perpetrators. These competing effects are usually attributed to the response of party elites to the violence, yet unpacking the direct effect of party framing is usually difficult since parties respond at the same time as the voters. We study the effect of antisemitic riots in France in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair on the 1898 Chamber of Deputies election, before mass political parties. Combining historical municipal-level election data and novel information on the locations of the riots, we find two backlash effects: a decline in electoral support for extreme right candidates; and an increase in support for antisemitic candidates. These results suggest that when the salience of the issue promoted by the violent actors is already high, voters are likely to mobilize against the perpetrators, and this effect need not be driven by party elite framing.

Work in progress

• When the state arbitrates identity: Building the nation through schooling in the Czech Lands (1880-1910)

• Anglicans, Dissenters and Electoral Behavior in 19th century Great Britain (with Carles Boix and Guillem Riambau) [Abstract]

  This paper examines the religious origins of political parties in Great Britain. To that avail, we digitize all 19th century censuses at the most micro level (Parish level). We merge these datasets to all electoral results in the 19th century and to the March 30, 1851, Religious Census. The latter is the only census in UK’s history to tally attendances for every single church and chapel in all of England and Wales. Our results indicate that support for Tories (Whigs) was significantly stronger where the Anglican Church (New Dissent) was stronger. These results are robust to the inclusion of various sociodemographic controls, suggesting that religion had an influence on party support over and above social class or economic interest.

• Militants in Exile: Spanish Republicans and Political Mobilization in France (with Alejandro López-Peceño and Elias Dinas) [Abstract]

  While a large literature studies how migrants' mere presence affects natives’ attitudes, less is known about how migrants can actively reshape the politics of destination societies. We argue that politically experienced migrants can transplant organizational capacity into host communities, strengthening the local mobilization capacity of aligned host-country parties. We examine this argument by studying the exile of half a million Spanish Republicans to France: left-wing exiles with substantial experience in party and union organizing. We leverage newly digitized individual-level refugee records to show that communes hosting Spanish refugees shifted toward communist candidates in the postwar period. These results cannot be driven by compositional effects because most refugees did not have voting rights. Instead, we provide evidence that refugees participated in associational organizing and became disproportionately represented in local branches of the French Communist Party, consistent with a mechanism of organizational embedding that translated into postwar electoral gains for the communists.

• Taking out the Trash: Political implications of door-to-door waste management in Catalonia (with Max Bradley and Cèlia Estruch-Garcia)

Other work

• Temporary Disenfranchisement Revisited: A Report from the 2023 Montréal Replication Games on the Robustness of Recent Findings in the APSR (with Joris Frese, Alexandros Christos Gkotinakos, and Matthew Hepplewhite), I4R Discussion Paper Series, No. 87, Institute for Replication (I4R), s.l.
  [Paper] [Repository]