09.09.2021 We welcome Miquel Pellicer at the Center for Conflict Studies!

We are very pleased to welcome Miquel Pellicer to the Center for Conflict Studies. Starting in October, he will enrich research and teaching at the Center as a professor ("Hessenprofessor").

Miquel obtained his PhD at the European University Institute. Before joining Philipps University Marburg, Miquel was Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town and held Senior Researcher positions at GIGA Institute for Global and Area Studies, and the Institute of Political Science at the University of Duisburg Essen in Germany. Miquel is a research affiliate at SALDRU, a leading research unit on the study of inequality in Africa.

Miquel’s research focuses on different dimensions of inequality and poverty. He uses a multidisciplinary approach that combines insights from Economics, Political Science, Sociology, and Psychology. Methodologically, he also adopts a pluralist approach, although his main expertise is in quantitative methods, particularly those that focus on causality.

Substantively, Miquel is particularly interested in understanding how inequality can be effectively reduced and what stands in the way for doing so. Part of his research focuses on the political role of citizens in promoting economic equality: When do citizens demand redistribution from the state? When do they protest and what do they protest about? When do they vote for non class parties? A second part of his work evaluates the success of specific social policies, asking if they succeed in empowering disadvantaged groups.

Currently, Miquel is Co-PI of the DFG project “The Demand Side of Clientelism” that challenges the assumption that citizens are willing recipients of any clientelist benefits if only poor enough. The project combines focus groups, survey experiments, and lab experiments in South Africa and Tunisia to study citizen preferences for different types of clientelism. Together with Eva Wegner, he is currently working on a book manuscript on the Citizen Side of Clientelism.

Miquel’s next project focuses on political inequality. This is an important emerging topic of research developed mainly in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. In contrast, little is known about the extent of political inequality in poorer democracies. Do middle classes and disadvantaged groups in emerging democracies have political influence? Do informal linkages between politicians and citizens in poorer democracies empower non-elites?

His work has appeared in leading journals such as such as Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Development Economics, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Economics of Education Review, among others. He has written chapters in several Oxford Handbook series. He is member of the editorial board of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology.