Halevy, Lotem

Lotem Halevy is a mixed-method and interdisciplinary social scientist. She studies democratization and nationalism in Central Europe from a historical perspective. Her work seeks to understand the intertwined origins of nationalism and democracy by bridging top-down and bottom-up explanations for regime change (or lack thereof). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence, The Politics of Inequality, at the University of Konstanz, where she is working on her book project, Who Gets to Play? Enfranchisement and Party System Consolidation in Central Eastern Europe. In the book, she goes back in time to when party systems “froze”, to try and understand why some European party systems are more persistently nationalist than others.

In addition to her book project, she is working on several methodology papers that stem from the intensive data collection effort the project entailed. With and without coauthors, the papers combine different methodologies—formal modeling, ethnography, interviews, natural language processing, and simple statistical techniques borrowed from demography—to better understand political history, recent and distant, with quantitative data.

Lastly, she is currently reading for a new book project, tentatively called “The Political Economy of Hate: The democratic origins of political antisemitism”. Here, she explores the mass backlash to the early political incorporation of (some) Jews in Central Eastern Europe by political elites. 

She defended her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. During the 2022-2023 academic year, she was the Queen Elizabeth Scholar at the University of Oxford, Department of Politics and International Relations and St. Catherine's College. During the 2022 academic year, she was a visiting PhD student at  LSE's European Institute .