Introduction
My name is Jacob Nyrup. I am an Associate Professor at University of Oslo. I hold a DPhil in Politics from Nuffield College, University of Oxford, where I am also an Associate Member. Furthermore, I am affiliated with the projects ELDAR and WEALTHPOL.
My research has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, European Journal of Political Research, Comparative Politics, and other journals. I mostly work within comparative politics and political economy. My CV can be found here.
Bio and research interests
My research focuses on three separate areas, namely
authoritarian regimes, wealth inequality, and
Danish municipalities. To most people these three topics
seem incompatible and weirdly unrelated. Nonetheless, my choice of
research is not the result of a completely random walk.
I did my first master’s degree at London School of Economics, where I
studied statistics and political economy. Here, I wrote my thesis on
coalition formation in Danish Municipalities. This may sound dull to
most people, but it actually concerns a fairly important issue; how is
power distributed following an election? Furthermore, it opened up my
eyes to the ocean of data, which is available on elections in Danish
municipalities. My research on Danish municipalities
includes the paper Confident
and cautious candidates: Explaining under-representation of women in
Danish municipal politics (With Malte Dahl), and another article on
the inclusion of extreme parties in
local government witten with Martin Vinæs Larsen and Frederik Hjorth
is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics. As part of this
project we have build the most comprehensive database on local elections
in Denmark.
After finishing my first master’s degree, I went on to do another at
University of Copenhagen. Here, I took courses in development economics
and comparative regime types. I found that, while there is a big body on
literature on institutions in democracies, the literature on
authoritarian regimes is lacking. Therefore, I decided to apply for a
Ph.D., focusing on authoritarian regimes. My research on
authoritarian regimes includes the papers Performance
and Promotions in an Autocracy (with Lasse Aaskoven) and The Morning
After: Cabinet Instability and the Purging of Ministers after Failed
Coup Attempts in Autocracies (with Laure Bokobza, Suthan
Krishnarajan, Casper Sakstrup, and Lasse Aaskoven). I am working on a
handful of papers based on my PhD. Furthermore, the project WhoGov
emanates from my Ph.D. WhoGov is the largest available dataset on
members of government across time and countries, and is presented in the
article Who
Governs? A New Global Dataset on Members of Cabinets. WhoGov won the
Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Best Data Set Award 2021.
I began my Ph.D. at Oxford in October 2016. I had Ben Ansell as my
supervisor. Here, I got affiliated with the WEALTHPOL-project, and I
therefore also work on wealth inequality. As a part of the
project I have, amongst other things, co-authored the paper Sheltering
Populists? House Prices and the Support for Populist Parties (With
Ben Ansell, Martin Vinæs Larsen and Frederik Hjorth). This article won
the APSA European Politics and Society section Best Article Award
2022.
