Professor Carles Boix will lead an ERC Advanced Grant research project at the UB on party systems in Europe and North America
Carles Boix, Robert Garret professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, will lead -at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona- a research project for which he obtained an Advanced Grant, a prestigious grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to senior researchers. This research project aims to analyze the creation of political parties, the crystallization of the different party systems and the choice of electoral systems in Europe and North America during the first world democratization wave between mid-nineteenth century and the interwar period.
Carles Boix, Robert Garret professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, will lead -at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona- a research project for which he obtained an Advanced Grant, a prestigious grant given by the European Research Council (ERC) to senior researchers. This research project aims to analyze the creation of political parties, the crystallization of the different party systems and the choice of electoral systems in Europe and North America during the first world democratization wave between mid-nineteenth century and the interwar period.
Professor Boix, graduated in Law and in Geography and History at the UB, holds a doctorate from Harvard University. He worked as consultant at the World Bank and in the Inter-American Development Bank, and is member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2010. His research covers the areas of political economy and comparative politics, especially democratic theory, the origins of institutions and their effects on growth and inequality.
The project he will lead at the UB, entitled The birth of party democracy. The emergence of mass parties and the choice of electoral laws in Europe and North America (1870-1940), combines statistical and historical methods to analyse, among other subjects, the creation of mass parties, the emergence of socialist parties and the strategic choice of different electoral systems. Therefore, he will integrate the specific sociological analysis of the electoral behaviour with institution approaches which emphasise the impact of organizational factors (for example, the extension and power of the unions) and constitutional or legislative factors (such as electoral rules). The project will develop a database with geographical location of the electoral results and socioeconomic traits of each electoral district in the analysed countries. This database will enable inferring individual behaviours of the voters with the help of new statistical analysis methods.
The project is part of the new Research Group on Institutions and Political Economy of the UB, led by Carles Boix. This group was created with the financial support of the ERC Advanced Grant and the institutional support of the University of Barcelona School of Econòmics and the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation. The main objectives of the research group are to promote the study of the role of the institutions regarding stability and political order, the political representation of the individual and social interests and the economic development and redistribution, as well as promoting integration among different social sciences in Barcelona, especially political science, economy, sociology and history.
The aim of the Advanced Grants is to promote European research and make it more competitive at a global scale. These grants given by the ERC support researchers of excellence who work on research projects in emerging fields, in frontier research, and are able to spread the limits of knowledge.