Alexandre Afonso

Die Debatte über die Schaffung europäischer Anleihen zur Bekämpfung der Coronakrise ist von Vorurteilen geprägt, die nicht der Realität entsprechen. Italien wird oft als zu verschwenderisch dargestellt, hat aber tatsächlich in den letzten 30 Jahren äußerst sparsam gewirtschaftet. Es zahlt heute allerdings immer noch für politische Fehler, die in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren gemacht…

Recently, the Dutch right-wing magazine Elsevier used this cover to illustrate its stance on the rescue package devised by European governments to tackle the corona crisis. The header reads “not a cent more for Southern Europe”. The drawing is quite explicit: at the top, blond hard-working Northern Europeans. At the bottom, a hairy South European…

Alexandre Afonso, Leiden University Written for The Future is Blue Newsletter The corona-crisis and the measures to slow the spread of the virus have led governments to put their economies in an “induced coma”. A large proportion of workers are either asked to work from home, or to put their economic activity on hold. The…

Pippa Norris was kind enough to share an advance version of the dataset she collected on academic political scientists around the world, which will be presented for the 50th anniversary of the European Consortium for Political Research. The datasets contains lots of variables about the education, place of work and career of political scientists employed…

In the graph above (zoomable version here), I have mapped the votes of British MPs in the 8 options given to them on March 27 (a couple of hours ago) in indicative votes. This is a 2-mode network linking MPs and options for Brexit. The network graph shows how different options are related to each…

I made this animation using John Burn-Murdoch’s code and data from the Maddison Project Database.

In a number of recent projects (see e.g here), I have been interested in the structure of the academic job market, how it is organised in different countries, and how it may shape the ideas that it produces (see here for a comparison of economists in the US and Germany). Something that we highlight in…

In my course on Global Challenges, I ask students to submit a policy podcast. Here are the guidelines that I give to students, and an example of what students have done. Purpose of the assignment The purpose of this assignment is for you to demonstrate the ability to use the theoretical tools provided in the course by…