LOTEM HALEVY

I am a mixed-method and interdisciplinary social scientist. I study democratization and nationalism in Central Europe from a historical perspective. My work seeks to understand the intertwined origins of nationalism and democracy by bridging together top-down and bottom-up explanations for regime change (or lack thereof).  I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Queen Elizabeth Scholar at the University of Oxford. During the 2022 academic year I was a visiting PhD student at LSE's European Institute.  
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Why do some party systems consolidate around nationalist cleavages, while others come to be dominated by class cleavages? My dissertation book project, Who Gets to Play? Enfranchisement and Party System Consolidation in Central Eastern, explains the logic of enfranchisement in diverse societies and explores the consequences of sustained disenfranchisement throughout the long democratization process during which the rules of the democratic game were constructed. The first half of the book studies the causes of enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, specifically, how autocratic rulers sought to maintain their incumbency throughout the long democratization process by deciding who got to play the game. The second half of the book explores the consequences of disenfranchisement on the mobilization tactics of extra-parliamentary parties through the provision of social services and necessary club goods. Taken together, I explain how the constituent parts of party systems—parties, survive democratization to form the cleavages in democratic politics. For more information about my dissertation book project click here.

During over eleven months of archival fieldwork, I collected and digitized micro-level data from the constituent states of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, including electoral data, census data; a dataset that tracks the entry, exit and merger of political parties in the Empire which relies on primary sources such as newspapers, speeches and party manifestos; digitized data on the presence, function, and access to civil associations in the Kingdom of Hungary and Austrian Silesia; and finally a dataset that tracks the requisites in electoral law that were used to lower and raise the threshold of inclusion from 1789 to 1945 in 30 emergent European states.