SCHOLARLY WORK
PUBLISHED WORKS
RECENT PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
Alper, Kaitlin and Eroll Kuhn. 2026. Transnational Political Participation Among Dual Citizens. Electoral Studies. 101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2026.103075
This article looks at the political participation of dual citizens across multiple national contexts. Using a novel survey of dual citizens, we investigate both the extent to which dual citizens participate politically in more than one country and the individual-level factors that explain this behavior. We show that transnational political participation varies by the cost of participation: while high-cost activities such as donating money or contacting politicians are concentrated in the country of residence, participation in lower-cost activities such as voting and online political expression frequently occurs across multiple countries. We further find that dual transnational participation is best explained by extending standard models of political behavior, particularly through the effects of partisanship and political sophistication, rather than by frameworks emphasizing migrant-specific resources. These findings have implications for theories of political behavior, transnationalism, and immigrant integration.
Alper, Kaitlin and Caroline Marie Lancaster. 2025. The Strength of Attachment: Regionalism, Nationalism and Vote Choice. West European Politics. 48(1):138-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2023.2253514
This article examines the relationship between strength of regional identity and voting for the radical right in Western Europe. Using ESS data and a new measure of regional identity strength constructed from the Regionalist Parties Dataset (Massetti and Schakel 2016), we show three things: First, people living in regions with strong legacies of regionalism are less attached to their national state; second, regional identity strength is negatively associated with voting for radical right parties; lastly, this relationship can eclipse the effect of immigration attitudes on vote choice as radical right parties’ rhetoric around immigration generally focuses on cultural homogeneity. Evidence supporting these hypotheses is found using both cross-national data and case evidence from Italy.
RECENT BOOK CHAPTERS
Alper, Kaitlin. 2025. Contesting Jurisdiction: Social Policy Attributes and the Territorial Distribution of Competences in Federations. In Inequality, Redistribution, and Federalism: A Territorial Approach, ed. Olivier Jacques and Alain Noël. Montréal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
This chapter examines why different social policy competences are concentrated at different jurisdictional levels in federations, arguing that policy domains exhibit tendencies toward centralization or decentralization based on their historical development and strength of functional pressures acting upon them. The chapter develops a typology of (1)geographically bound, (2)historically diffuse, and (3)contested social policies using comparisons of social housing, unemployment benefits, and parental leave policies in Australia, Canada, and Germany. In doing so, it offers a historical and policy-centered framework for understanding the territorial structure of welfare states in federal systems.
Alper, Kaitlin, Peter Starke and Queralt Tornefoch Chirveches. 2024. Mapping unequal security across rich OECD countries. In Unequal Security: Welfare, Crime and Social Inequality, ed. Peter Starke, Laust Lund Elbek, and Georg Wenzelburger. New York, NY: Routledge.
This chapter explores the relationship between welfare states and subjective insecurity across advanced democracies. Using cross-national and longitudinal survey data, we show that larger and more generous welfare states are associated with lower average levels of insecurity, but less clearly with reducing inequalities in insecurity between social groups. These findings have implications for understanding the protective role of welfare states in an era increasingly characterized by economic and social insecurity..
PUBLIC-FACING SCHOLARSHIP
EPLO EU to Campus Podcast - Interview with Kaitlin Alper introducing the European Parliament
EU Today Podcast - Interview with Kaitlin Alper on economic inequality in the EU
BOOK PROJECT: REGIONAL GOVERNANCE, AUTHORITY AND REDISTRIBUTION
OVERVIEW
This project, based in my dissertation, focuses on the inclination and ability of subnational governments to redistribute income within their borders. The geographic scope of this project includes the advanced post-industrial democracies of Western Europe and the Anglo-American countries. I contend that regional political actors’ policy aims are focused at the level of the subnational unit, and thus they may use their authority over transfer spending to reduce regional inequality. In contrast, central government actors are focused on national-level outcomes, and thus route social spending to achieve national-level objectives.
This project is organized into two parts. First, I argue that regional left party incumbency is a significant predictor of inequality reduction at the subnational level; that regionally-determined transfer spending is also a significant predictor of inequality reduction within regions; and that spending on regionally-determined social transfers has a larger substantive effect on within-region inequality reduction than do nationally-determined social transfers. Second, I argue that the ability of subnational political actors to affect inequality outcomes via transfer spending is a function of both their de jure and their de facto bargaining power relative to the central government.
DATA COLLECTION EFFORT
A central component of this project is the creation of a novel Regional Political Economy and Social Policy dataset (still in progress). This dataset is composed of approximately 2,500 region-years from 19 advanced industrial democracies from 1980 to the present. Harmonizing microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) and the Eurostat Standards of Income and Living Conditions (SILC) datasets and supplementing it with data from the OECD, I have collected data on political economic and demographic data at the subnational level, including regional-level market and disposable income inequality for the general and working age populations; regional-level relative market and disposable income poverty rates; and regional-level unemployment figures.
I have also collected social transfer spending data for six types of social transfers, including regional per capita spending on unemployment insurance, disability payments and family benefits, among others. In addition, I am using policy documents and reports, constitutions and legislation to hand-code data on the level of government responsible for setting benefit levels for each of these types of social transfers. This will allow for the creation of variables measuring per capita spending on regionally- vs. nationally-determined social transfers. My goal is to create a dataset that will allow me to pursue an extensive research agenda focused on the social and economic impacts of regional vs. national social policy and transfer spending.
QUALITATIVE INTERVIEW RESEARCH
In addition to creating a quantitative cross-national dataset, I am conducting in-depth interviews with politicians and experts in France and Germany to elucidate causal mechanisms. I have chosen four regions in France and four regions in Germany based on their party alignment and relative wealth. From May through July 2021, I conducted over twenty such interviews in France while based at Sciences Po in Paris, including interviews with national, regional, departmental and municipal politicians. I have thus collected qualitative data on the policy goals and resource constraints of subnational politicians as they relate to economic inequality outcomes in France. From October through December 2021, I conducted similar interviews in Germany while based at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) at Universität Bremen.
SELECTED OTHER ONGOING WORK
REGIONAL LANGUAGES AND MULTILEVEL POLITICAL ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR
I have recently received an Inge Lehmann Programme Grant for 2026 from the Danish Science Foundation (DFF) to study regional languages and political attitudes. This project follows from a pilot study funded by the Regional Studies Association's Early Career Grant scheme, in which I and coauthor Queralt Tornafoch Chirveches conducted an original telephone survey experiment on 530 bilingual Catalan/Spanish speakers. In a series of papers under review, we find that taking a survey in Catalan, relative to Spanish, especially affects people's preferences over policy (de)centralization, their territorial identities and their voting intentions - both in terms of voting for regionalist parties and voting for secession.
In the Inge Lehmann project (LANGPOL), which will begin in October 2026 and run through 2029, I will build on this successful pilot study to answer the central research question: To what extent, how and why does speaking a regional language affect political attitudes and behavior? I will answer this research through several sub-questions: How does national and regional context affect the relationship between language and political attitudes/behavior in linguistically distinct regions? What is the role of regional language use in the formation of political opinions and behaviors? The overarching goal of these questions is to uncover specific mechanisms and contextual factors linking regional language use to political attitudes and behavior among citizens.
As such, LANGPOL will greatly expand on existing research by making several key contributions: First, as the first comparative study on the topic, it will identify spatially-invariant relationships between regional language use and political attitudes and behavior; and contextual factors conditioning these relationships. WP1 aims to do this via a series of telephone survey experiments in various linguistically distinct regions in Europe and North America. Second, as the first to examine political communication in a regional minority language as a social process, it will reveal mechanisms by which people negotiate and form political opinions in linguistically-distinct regions. WP2 will use focus groups in a single linguistically distinct regions to uncover these mechanisms.
INSECURITY AND THE WELFARE STATE
The project which was the focus of my recent postdoc focuses on the political roots and consequences of 'unequal' (subjective) insecurity in modern advanced democracies. In a book chapter, coauthored with Peter Starke and Queralt Tornafoch Chirveches, we comprehensively maps empirical patterns of subjective insecurity across about 20,000 individuals in 20 OECD countries, using the 2020 Risks That Matter Survey data and other data sources. In a related article currently under review, we look at the ability of the welfare state to a) reduce the security gap between the rich and poor and b) reduce the security gap between men and women. We find that targeted welfare state interventions do not meaningfully reduce the security gap between income groups or between men and women. We complement this with national survey data from Denmark.
Lastly, in a paper (currently under review) based on a survey experiment fielded in Denmark and Germany, Peter Starke and I look at the intersection of physical and economic subjective insecurity and its effect on people's attitudes towards both the welfare state and the criminal justice system. Specifically, we are interested in how physical and economic insecurity shocks affect people's willingness to support more punitive criminal justice and welfare policies.
DUAL CITIZENSHIP AND TRANSNATIONAL POLITICAL ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR
This project, coauthored with Eroll Kuhn, explores the phenomenon of dual citizenship and its potential for elucidating the effect of context on political attitudes and behavior. Despite an increasingly transnational world, scholarship on dual citizens - arguably the most explicit manifestation of this - has been lacking. This introductory set of studies aims to do two things. First, we conduct a classical survey experiment of four sets of dual citizens (British-American, British-Italian, German-American, German-Italian) to test how priming participants to place themselves in one context vs. another influences their political attitudes and voting behavior. Second, we conduct a within-person experiment of these same groups, asking participants to vote in both contexts as we track their decision-making process using methodology borrowed from behavioral economics. The first article from this project was recently published in Electoral Studies.
THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC TRANSIT
Finally, a burgeoning research agenda looks at the politics of public transit. Public transit policies - and other urban infrastructure policies - have clear distributive consequences, yet have been largely left out of welfare state research. In an ongoing book chapter, I extend power resources theory to a new policy domain and highlight the growing political importance of public transit in an era of urbanization and the green transition. I argue first that left parties are generally more likely to support investment and affordability in public transit, while right parties tend to privilege automobility and market provision. However, these dynamics are complicated by multilevel governance and the unique politics of urban spaces. In related early-stage research, I and coauthor Itay Machtei look at the distributive consequences of public transit privatization. Ultimately, I hope that this project can be a jumping off point for a broader research agenda in this area.