The article "A Trump Effect on the EU's Popularity? The U.S. Presidential Election as a Natural Experiment", co-authored with Lara Minkus and Jan Delhey, is now published online-first at Perspectives on Politics. In the paper, we treat Trump's unexpected victory as an external shock and use a Eurobarometer survey that was conducted in all EU-28 member states four days prior to (control group) and six days after the election (treatment group) as source material for a natural experiment. The analysis reveals that the election of Trump caused a significant increase in the EU’s popularity in Europe immediately after the election. This “Trump effect” is considerable in size, roughly equivalent to three years of education. Gains in popularity were particularly high among respondents who perceived their country as economically struggling and, surprisingly, among the political right, suggesting that Trump’s victory broadened and ideologically diversified the EU’s base of support.  We also show that no such effect occurred when Obama was re-elected as U.S. president in 2012.

The article can be freely accessed here. A blog post summarizing the main findings has been published at the London School of Economics's United States Politics and Policy blog.

On Monday, September 17, 2018, I started to work as a visiting scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. Over the next weeks and months, I will collaborate with Michele Vespe and Lorenzo Gabrielli in an exciting transdisciplinary project on cross-border air traffic and human mobility. More information to follow.

The article "Swinging Leftward: Public Opinion on Economic and Political Integration in Latin America, 1997-2010", co-authored with Lara Minkus, has just been published open access at Latin American Research Review. The paper argues that coinciding with the shift to the left in Latin American politics, regional integration in Latin America accelerated during the last two decades. Yet, whereas support for European integration has been tracked systematically for decades, trend analyses of public opinion on Latin American integration are still missing. Combining data from eight Latinobarometer surveys on 106,590 respondents from seventeen South and Central American countries, this article provides the first longitudinal analysis of Latin Americans’ support for their continent’s economic and political integration. Using multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression, we reveal intra- and intersocietal trends and cleavages. Our results show that support rates are generally declining from high initial levels. Furthermore, while gender and educational gaps in public opinion remained stable over time, considerable shifts occurred with regard to political orientation: starting from the lowest initial values, the left surpassed the right—and, at least in the case of support for political integration, also the center—to become the political wing favoring integration most highly. This finding shows, contrary to prevailing ideas, that the political center is not necessarily the primary supporter of integration. When regionalism is increasingly driven by left-wing governments, public support for regional integration may also swing to the left.

On 1 February 2018, I moved to Florence to start a new position at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. In specific, I now work as a postdoctoral research associate in the Global Mobilities Project at the Migration Policy Centre, together with Ettore Recchi and Andrew Geddes.
​We intend to set up a Global Mobilities Database (GMD), collecting information on a large palette of spatial mobilities, as well as their demographic, economic, sociological and legal-political aspects. Drawing on a range of sources from international organizations to private companies, from digital-trace to administrative data, the GMD will cover connections between countries from around the world in a longitudinal perspective.