PhD in Business and Management - Do progressive support bases constrain the achievement of socio-economic equality?

Cardiff Business School invites applications from exceptional candidates with a first class or strong upper second class honours degree, and/or appropriate Master’s degree. The University values diversity and equality at all levels and we encourage applications from all sections of the community, irrespective of age, disability, sex, gender identity, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief and sexual orientation. 

The successful candidate will be enrolled on the PhD in Business and Management at Cardiff Business School.

Please visit here for further information about the PhD Programme at Cardiff Business School.

Applicant Profile:

The ideal candidate for this project has a specialist Master’s Degree in Business, Management or related subjects from an internationally renowned University. Applicants with a strong first degree will also be considered. The ideal applicant has the motivation and ability to conduct fieldwork and is open to try different methodological approaches.

Project Description:

Support bases of left-wing and liberal political parties increasingly consist of wealthier voters. As economic and cultural changes have driven low-income citizens to right-populist parties, left-wing and liberal parties have attracted socio-cultural professionals such as doctors and teachers (Kriesi et al., 2008). Though left-wing and certain liberal (‘progressive’) parties continue to espouse redistributive goals, previous research (e.g. Hibbs, 1977) suggests a decrease in support from low-income voters will make redistribution harder to achieve as parties respond to the preferences of their voters. Socio-cultural professionals have distinct social policy preferences, favouring education, social investment and gender equality (Häusermann, Picot and Geering, 2013: 228); poorer voters prefer redistributive transfers. Initial research has investigated this phenomenon, finding that support bases sometimes constrain redistributive ability (Abou-Chadi and Immergut, 2018; Engler and Zohlnhöfer, 2019; Gingrich and Häusermann, 2015), yet this scholarship emphasizes rational occupation of political space, underplaying policy legacies (Pierson, 1995) and discourse (Schmidt, 2002).

Colleagues and I are working on a project which addresses this shortcoming, using a mixed-methods comparative approach to examine how the interplay of path dependent policy preferences and electoral contingency combine to produce the social policy platforms of progressive parties in Europe. I would like to find a PhD student who is interested in working on this question. I am open to different methodological approaches. In our project, we use mixed methods which include time-series analysis, survey experiments and content and discourse analysis. Though our research focuses on Europe, I am interested in cases in other regions.

Applicants should take careful consideration of the working title and description of the project, and may wish to contact the named member of staff for a discussion prior to applying.

·      The Lead supervisor on this project is, Dr Thomas Prosser, ProsserTJ@cardiff.ac.uk