About

Carles Boix is the Robert Garrett Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He teaches and conducts research on political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on empirical democratic theory, the choice of institutions, and their consequences for growth and inequality. He is a Faculty Associate at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Additionally, Carles Boix serves as the Director of the Institutions & Political Economy Research Group at the University of Barcelona.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Demographic economics
• Economics
• Sociology
• Political economy
• Public administration
• Law
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Resilient Democracies

  The Journal of Politics · 2025-05-06 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Church as Arbiter: A Divided Right in Interwar France

  The Journal of Politics · 2025-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Turnout, Family, and Gender Norms: The Political Incorporation of Women in Sweden, 1921–1960

  World Politics · 2025-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  abstract: This article investigates the historical process through which women mobilized at the ballot box and caught up with men's high voting turnout. The authors employ a unique set of official electoral data in Sweden collected between 1921 and 1960, recording all eligible voters' participation by gender, occupational group, and marital status. Although, in line with standard models of turnout, women's individual resources mattered, the authors show how the changing nature of gender norms and institutions played a crucial role in mobilizing women. Under traditional gender norms, female participation was strongly related to marital status: married women, arguably following their husbands' lead, voted at levels similar to men's, whereas unmarried women participated much less. As gender norms evolved, emphasizing women's personal and professional autonomy, the gap in turnout between married and unmarried women narrowed. That process happened asynchronically across social strata, paralleling the diffusion of modern gender norms and practices: from urban upper classes first, to rural areas last.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Emancipation and Modern Jewish National Identity

  American Political Science Review · 2025-03-05 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Following the rise of liberalism and nationalism during the nineteenth century, Jewish national identity varied across countries. While Western European and American Jews mainly came to think of themselves as nationals of their country of citizenship, a growing number of Eastern European Jews claimed to be a separate nation with a legitimate claim to self-government. Comparing the evolution of Jewish identities across North America and Europe and leveraging a regression discontinuity design based on the differential treatment of Polish and Russian Jews under Tsarism, I find that their divergent national identities responded to the extent to which Jews were politically emancipated in the country where they lived over the long century that followed the Atlantic Revolutions. Social and economic modernization played a weaker role, suggesting the need to think about national identity formation as endogenous to political and constitutional transformations marking the birth of the contemporary era.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Labor Unrest, Political Activation and Female Electoral Participation in the 1930s

  2024-02-02

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  According to most of the available evidence, women were less likely to turn out than men when they got the right to vote. However, often these figures are based on simple comparisons of turnout rates between the pre and post female enfranchisement elections. Much less is known, however, about the root causes of female political participation upon formal electoral enfranchisement, and the variation in the magnitude of the gender turnout gap. This paper argues that past political experiences before the franchise might be key to understand women’s actual behavior when they got the right to vote. This question is analyzed by exploiting a wave of labour unrest in Catalonia during the 1915-1920 period in the textile sector, prior to the introduction of female suffrage. We have compiled a unique individual level data-set of official registers with individual voting roll-calls as well as other personal characteristics, such as age, address, gender and literacy. We also exploit detailed information on local industry composition and labour conflicts at the local level to investigate the political activation of women and its effects on electoral participation later on.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Value of Public Health

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Labor Unrest, Political Activation and Female Electoral Participation in the 1930s

  2024-02-02

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  According to most of the available evidence, women were less likely to turn out than men when they got the right to vote. However, often these figures are based on simple comparisons of turnout rates between the pre and post female enfranchisement elections. Much less is known, however, about the root causes of female political participation upon formal electoral enfranchisement, and the variation in the magnitude of the gender turnout gap. This paper argues that past political experiences before the franchise might be key to understand women’s actual behavior when they got the right to vote. This question is analyzed by exploiting a wave of labour unrest in Catalonia during the 1915-1920 period in the textile sector, prior to the introduction of female suffrage. We have compiled a unique individual level data-set of official registers with individual voting roll-calls as well as other personal characteristics, such as age, address, gender and literacy. We also exploit detailed information on local industry composition and labour conflicts at the local level to investigate the political activation of women and its effects on electoral participation later on.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Turnout, Family, and Gender Norms: The Political Incorporation of Women in Sweden (1921-1960)

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Resilient Democracies

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Social Democracy and the Birth of Working-Class Representation in Europe

  World Politics · 2024-07-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  abstract: Despite the growing interest in the economic backgrounds of mps in Western Europe, the evolution of working-class numerical representation before 1945 has not been systematically studied. Using data from England and Wales (1832–1944), Germany (1871–1930), and Norway (1906–1936), the authors show both that working-class mps were elected when barriers were lowered and that almost all working-class parliamentarians were affiliated with socialist parties. The authors further probe the conditions that determined the electoral success of workers using data about all candidates, constituencies’ occupational profile, and unionization in Norway between 1906 and 1936. They find that socialist parties nominated workers either in relatively uncompetitive elections in which unionization was high or in competitive races in which the party’s victory was possible but not guaranteed. Using information about mps in Germany and England and Wales, the authors find similar patterns. The article discusses the implications for research about democratization, the rise of social democracy, and the numerical representation of workers.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alı́cia Adserà

  IZA - Institute of Labor Economics

  26 shared

• Clara Riba

  Pompeu Fabra University

  17 shared

• Michael K. Miller

  16 shared

• Sebastian Rosato

  15 shared

• Stathis N. Kalyvas

  9 shared

• Andreu Arenas

  Universitat de Barcelona

  8 shared

• Jordi Muñoz

  Universitat de Barcelona

  5 shared

• Toni Rodón

  Pompeu Fabra University

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Government

  Harvard University

  1995

Awards & honors

• William Riker award for the best book on political economy
• Heinz Eulau award for best article published in the American…