Research Group Pellicer

We are part of the research team “Inequality and Distributive Politics” together with colleagues at the Institute of Political Science. Our research is on how inequality and politics interact. We wish to understand what stands on the way for democracies to successfully reduce inequalities among citizens. We work on inequality and collective action, on political inequality, on corruption, clientelism, politicians profiles, and on redistributitional policies.

We are currently working on three big projects: on political clientelism, on political inequality, and on politicians and wealth.

Methodologically, we adopt a pluralist approach, although with emphasis on quantitative methods, particularly those that focus on causality, such as survey experiments and regression discontinuity designs. In our projects, we collect data on politicians, on policies, on municipal spending, as well as individual-level data on citizen’s political behavior and attitudes via surveys.

We have a blog that discusses our own research and the research of others in ways that are easily accessible. We also publish a research digest every two weeks that selects five papers published during that period on inequality and distributive politics and summarizes them in tweet-size. 

We also engage with our community, and have started an initiative to provide map resources on inequality and local politics in our town: Marburg.