Fellows 2019
Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí – Max Weber Fellow
Ẹniọlá Ànúolúwapọ́ Ṣóyẹmí obtained her PhD in Political Science from Boston University, where she focused on political philosophy. She is currently working on a book manuscript, which asks how law comes to wield an especial type of legitimacy that secures the general obedience of a given population. Her book project combines political and legal philosophy with experimental fieldwork in Nigeria and archival research methods in England. By analysing, in particular, the arguments of Aristotle, Rousseau, and H.L.A. Hart, Ẹniọlá’s book project argues for an understanding of law’s moral legitimacy that is separate from the internal morality of law, but that is prior and accounts for, its legal legitimacy. The project demonstrates a connection between participation, citizens’ perception of the law’s moral legitimacy, and obedience. The project does not follow the trends of deliberative democratic theory, but in fact, acts as a challenge to that sub-field.Ẹniọlá’s research and teaching interests are in Ancient to Early Modern Western Political Philosophy, African Philosophy, Modern Political Theory (Justice, Liberty and Freedom, Political and Moral Obligation), Legal Philosophy, Deliberative Theory, and Experimental Research Methods.
Andra Barbu-Roescu – Max Weber Fellow
Andra Barbu-Roescu is a political scientist interested in public opinion and attitudes, voting behaviour, policy responsiveness and policy feedback effects and quantitative research methods.
During her Fellowship, she will focus on welfare and health care policies, aiming to research how changes in policy affect public opinion and voting behaviour and vice-versa. Moreover, she will also look at the role institutions and electoral competition play in this process.
Andra holds a PhD in political science from the SNSPA (2013) with a thesis on the effects of electoral systems on voting behaviour. During her PhD, she has spent time as a visiting fellow at Mannheim University (2011-2012) and at the Central European University (2013). She has also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Southampton University (2015-2018), studying health care attitudes and policy effects as part of HEALTHDOX, a Norface funded project focusing on the future of Health Care Systems across Europe.
During her PhD and after, Andra has taught research design and quantitative methods in political science and electoral systems and public policy courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Mauricio Bucca – Max Weber Fellow
Mauricio Bucca is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute.
Previously, he earned his PhD in Sociology at Cornell University. He studies labour market inequalities, intergenerational mobility and beliefs about inequality using a combination of statistical modelling, empirical strategies for causal inference, experimental and computational methods.
His scholarly agenda articulates two core and complementary research streams. One series of projects examines key structural aspects of social inequality – intergenerational income mobility, gender and racial gaps in the labour market and educational assortative mating.
Another line of research focuses on the cultural facets of social stratification as they crystallize in specific belief systems about inequalities and fairness.
He studied these topics in the United States and Latin America and is now interested in expanding the scope of his research by incorporating a broader range of national contexts.
In tandem with his substantive research agenda, he has implemented novel statistical tools such as Bayesian models with structured dispersion for the study of sibling correlations, Lasso regularization for selection of log-linear models, and micro-simulations for the study of educational assortative mating.
Raffaele Grotti – Research Fellow
Raffaele received his PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento in 2016. Between 2016 and 2018 he was Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin. He has been a visiting scholar at the Demographic Unit at the Stockholm University and at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Since 2011 he has contributed to several international comparative projects dealing with socio-economic inequalities and labour market and family dynamics. Raffaele is also a member of the Comparative Life Course & Inequality Research Centre (CLIC), EUI and of the Centre for Social Inequality Studies (CSIS), University of Trento. His main research interests include social and economic inequalities, income trajectories, family and labour market dynamics and welfare studies in comparative perspective. His other interests include quantitative methods and Stata programming.
Misun Lim – Max Weber Fellow
Misun Lim is a sociologist interested in family status and gender inequality in labour markets and public work and family policies. Her current research focuses on the connection between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. Her dissertation asked whether and how the wage penalty for motherhood changes both across the life course and across cohorts in the United States. Her earlier research studied the effect of marriage and the degree of household specialization on wages. In addition, she investigated cross-national differences in the effect of relationship status on earnings and examined the role of cultural contexts across multiple European countries.
During her Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship, Misun plans to expand the scope of her dissertation research and, using cross-national comparisons, examine how family policies and cultural contexts influence the effect of motherhood on workers’ wages. This work will draw on Misun’s training in quantitative methods, is expected to culminate in the publication of journal articles, and should involve new collaborative research projects.
Misun will be awarded a PhD in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2018. She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Seoul and an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University.
Stefano Ronchi – Max Weber Fellow
Stefano Ronchi carried out his PhD in the Research Training Group SOCLIFE at the University of Cologne/University Duisburg-Essen. He holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Pavia, an MA in International Labour and Social Policies from the University of Milan, and an Advanced Master in Public Policy and Social Change from Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin. He was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Social Policy in Antwerp (with an InGRID 7th Framework Grant) and at KU Leuven (with a Jos Berghman WelfareStudies Stipend). Stefano’s research interests include comparative welfare state analysis, labour market policies and the politics of social policy, topics which he addresses with both quantitative and qualitative methods. His PhD dissertation looked at welfare state change in Europe through the lens of the ‘social investment approach’. The thesis assessed the divergence in the outcomes of social investment-oriented policies across European welfare states.At the EUI, Stefano will develop his PhD thesis into a book. He will also further extend his research agenda: on the one hand, by assessing a broader range of well-being returns on social investment policies; on the other, by studying the determinants of the (non-) development of social investment from a comparative political economy perspective. During his PhD, Stefano taught his own BA course on ‘The origins and transformation of European welfare states’ at the Cologne Centre for Comparative Politics (University of Cologne).