14.02.2024 Welcome at the Center for Conflict Studies, Prisca Jöst-Brenneis!

Prisca Jöst-Brenneis is a Postdoc at the University of Marburg and the Inequality and Distributive Politics (IDP) research group, working on the “Politicians, Policies, and the Reproduction of Wealth” project. She is also affiliated with the Governance and Local Development Institute (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg. Before joining the University of Marburg, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” and the Development Politics research group (Prof. Anke Hoeffler) at the University of Konstanz. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in June 2021.
She was a visiting research fellow at the McMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University (Spring 2022) and a visiting doctoral student at the University of Mannheim, Chair of Empirical Democracy Research.

Her research broadly focuses on comparative politics and development studies. She studies political and civic participation, social and economic policies and social inequality in Africa. She relies on survey and experimental methods and in-depth field research in her work. Her dissertation studies the role of community norms and social ties in the political participation of poor and unemployed citizens, providing empirical evidence from Tunisia, Zambia, Malawi, Kenya, and the United Kingdom. Her work has appeared in World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Political Studies, and Mobilization.

In some of her ongoing work, she investigates

  • how the socioeconomic characteristics of politicians shape their political attitudes and behavior and how this translates into different policy outcomes
  • where and under which conditions citizens contribute to community welfare
  • who can most effectively mobilize citizens to engage in public goods provision or to vote for a political candidate and why
  • which factors help explain resilience and social cohesion in local communities
  • where and why do citizens perceive non-coethncis as community outsiders
  • how do outsider perceptions relate to political behavior and conflict?